Match Fixing: An Economics Perspective
Match fixing to serve betting interests is certainly as old as organised sport itself, for example it is believed to have been common in the case of eighteenth century professional cricket in England. And in the twentieth century, the history of sport eve
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Abstract The chapter employs a simple supply-demand framework to account for the evident step increase in the incidence of match fixing in sport since the Millennium. The supply of fixes comes from players and other sports insiders and the demand from betting interests seeking an edge in wagering markets. The contemporary epidemic of fixing may be accounted for by developments in the betting sector, in particular by the rapid increase in liquidity in effectively unregulated markets. These developments have made fixing more lucrative and increased the demand for fixes. Policies to mitigate the resulting problems involve addressing both the supply and demand sides of the market for fixes. Responsibilities for different policies fall variously on governments, law enforcement agencies, gambling regulators and sport governing bodies. For sport, protecting integrity is argued to be part of the wider issue of good governance.
Introduction Match fixing to serve betting interests is certainly as old as organised sport itself, for example it is believed to have been common in the case of eighteenth century professional cricket in England. And in the twentieth century, the history of sport even at its most elite levels was punctuated by high-profile scandals, including fixes in the baseball World Series of 1919 and in the South Africa-England cricket series in 1990. For football (soccer), Hill (2010) gathered credible documentary evidence
D. Forrest (*) Salford Business School, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, UK e-mail: [email protected] M.R. Haberfeld and D. Sheehan (eds.), Match-Fixing in International Sports: Existing Processes, Law Enforcement, and Prevention Strategies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02582-7_10, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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that fixing was far from infrequent in the supposedly Golden Age of the game in England in the 1950s.1 So, match fixing is nothing new. On the other hand, reports of fixing appear to have become much more frequent in the twenty-first century and the sheer number of proven instances points to a step increase in incidence over the last decade. IRIS (2012) documents some of the most prominent cases. The most important, in terms of its producing rich evidence about the modus operandi of the fixers, was that revealed in a criminal trial in Bochum, Germany in 2012. The defendants, Croatians resident locally, had manipulated more than 300 football matches in 13 countries. Since then, football has been tainted by further revelations of fixing in all parts of the World. In 2013, Europol named nearly 300 matches between national teams which it alleged to have been the subject of fixing; and criminal trials of players and officials took place in countries such as Italy, Hungary, South Korea and China.2 2013 also saw a continued flow of scandals in cricket, including seemingly credible exposés of manipulation of international matches and in the very high profile Indian Premier League. Outside football and cricket, proven cases emerged in 20
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