Sports That Are Easiest to Rig

Without question, match-fixing is the dark underbelly of sports. It is something that has cast a smudge on virtually all athletic competitions, impacting their integrity and making fans become disaffected with them. Sadly, this is a practice that will not go away any time soon, as people will always be greedy and fall prey to the allure of selling out themselves and cheating the fans for money. We say this because the allure of match-fixing isn’t hard to grasp, especially nowadays, where millions are in play, and one rigged event can net millions for syndicates or individual gamblers. Underpaid athletes or coerced officials are often happy to collaborate to get their slice of the pie, and these kinds of partnerships probably date back to when people first started wagering on sports.

Match-fixing is a calculated heist. It is often a conspiracy involving multiple people, and aside from parties throwing contests outright, thanks to how people bet on sporting events today, athletes can fix contests without even losing them, making it even more appealing for many to step over to the dark side. Naturally, organized crime syndicates are customarily the puppet masters, historically speaking, and below, we tell you about what types of athletes are most targeted to succumb to the power of the almighty dollar.

Cricket

Cricket gets called the gentleman’s game. Hence, one would think that those involved in it would act gentlemanly, with class and integrity. Well, that is not always the case.

As you likely know, cricket is played primarily in the Oceania region, England, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The last three have sizable illegal betting markets, and the players in their domestic leagues do not make as much money as footballers per se. Thus, this makes them susceptible to bribes. Plus, in cricket, it is very easy to fix prop bets, like runs in an over, and in past eras, due to weak governance, this happened a lot.

Some of the biggest cricket match-fixing scandals are the 2000 Hansie Cronje one when South Africa’s captain admitted to taking $15,000 from bookies to throw matches against India, and the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing sting, where three players admitted to deliberately bowling no-balls at distinct moments.

India’s Premier League cricketers earn, on average, around half a million dollars in annual salaries, but ones from other countries are not so lucky, which is why they may get easily tempted to fix games.

Tennis

Tennis might seem an unlikely suspect, but its solo nature makes it a fixing magnet. One thing we must note is that it is rare that high-profile contests ever get thrown in tennis. Fixing usually occurs in lower-tier events, such as those from Challenger and ITF circuits. That is so because, in these events, oversight is thinner, and the prizes are low. If you follow tennis and think fixes do not occur in the sport, you are dead wrong. In 2016, research conducted by BuzzFeed News and the BBC revealed that the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) had flagged, from 2006 to 2016, sixteen players who ranked in the top fifty best in the world for suspicion of match-throwing.

In the 2000s, Russian and Italian betting syndicates got suspected of making boatloads of money off fixing tennis contests. It is essential to note that at the lower levels of tennis, there is not a lot of money to be made, and many players outside the top one hundred struggle to even cover travel costs.

Snooker

Another seemingly gentleman’s game. Like tennis, its solo nature allows a player to throw a frame or match without having to coordinate with anyone. Moreover, he can do so in a very unsuspecting way, as shots require such a high level of finesse and concentration, faking buckling under pressure or tiny mistakes is something that can be simply done.

On top of this, the number of granular bets available, especially in Asian markets, allows competitors to fix events in matches without altering the overall result.

Despite what most laypeople think, viewing snooker as a calm and peaceful sport played with honor and nobility, top players have gotten lifetime bans for partaking in nefarious activities, with notable examples being Stephen Lee, Mark King, Liang Wenbo, and Li Hang.

Basketball

We did an in-depth article on point-shaving scandals in basketball that we suggest you check out. This is a type of match-fixing that has a rich history, particularly in the US, where point-spread betting has been a thing for decades.

Basketball is easy to manipulate when it comes to spreads, as players can subtly affect them without drawing too much attention to themselves that they are doing this deliberately. This is easier to do in competitions with weaker oversight, like those in Asia and Europe. Bookmakers from around the globe accept bets on these, but their national governing bodies regulating these leagues may not be familiar with point-shaving practices, as gambling is not a major pastime in their country. Hence, they do not understand what is going on and cannot recognize when something suspicious is occurring. Thankfully, now, bookmakers get their data from state-of-the-art data providers, which have high-end algorithms that scan for suspicious betting activity and suspicious event happenings, flagging those where something is clearly up and removing their markets as allowed ones.

Soccer/Football

The world’s most popular sport is also the one most prone to match-fixing. Why? Well, for one, it is the most bet-on sport. It has the deepest system at the international and national levels. Each country has multiple football/soccer leagues, and bookmakers accept bets on all of them. For example, the fourth league in Italy may not draw much attention, but some bookmakers accept bets on its matches, and given that its players are not as well-paid, they can get easily influenced. Moreover, individuals can easily swing the result of the match. A goalkeeper can allow a goal that will present a massive setback for his club to bounce back from, and a referee can eject players undeservedly, weakening a team or calling undeserved penalties.

Aside from these issues, football/soccer has also seen scandals like the Calciopoli one in Italy, where top clubs impacted referee assignments to favor them. In some countries, rich clubs hold major sway, and they can affect what happens in the leagues they compete in. This also occurred in Turkey, where Fenerbahçe was involved in fixing games for their title race. In 2013, Europol announced results from an investigation this body ran from July 2011 to January 2013 in thirteen European countries and found evidence of attempts to fix close to four hundred professional soccer/football matches. While the number of fix has likely go sizeable down, they have not disappeared.

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