Launched on 4 June 2026 in Record, Portugal’s leading sports newspaper, SIGA’s weekly opinion column Linha da Frente (Front Line, in Portuguese) provides a dedicated platform to address issues at the heart of SIGA’s global agenda, including Sport Integrity, good governance, transparency, accountability, financial integrity, sports betting integrity, sustainability, youth development and protection, and the future of sport.
Click to read this week’s article in Portuguese.
Prevention Rather Than Cure: What the World Cup Leaves Behind on Preventing Integrity Issues
Paul Buck, Founder and CEO, EPIC Global Solutions
When I placed my first bet, I wasn’t thinking about odds or integrity. I backed a horse at 33/1 because it ran in the colours of my favourite football club, Preston North End.
It won by 12 lengths, and that moment gave me a feeling I would spend 17 years chasing. By the time I stopped, I had transacted €5.6m across 93 accounts and lost almost everything that mattered. I share this not for sympathy, but because it is the clearest evidence I have that gambling harm rarely announces itself — it hides in plain sight, inside a career, a marriage, a life that from the outside looks entirely in control.
With three days until the final whistle, the World Cup is entering its last act — and football has a rare opportunity: not to police betting after harm occurs, but to look honestly at what this tournament has shown us about prevention, and what still needs building before the next one. The tournament generated an extraordinary volume of betting activity, much of it legitimate, some of it not — the black market is a growing risk that was never hypothetical.
French police were alerted to an unusual surge in international betting linked to whether Elye Wahi, a current World Cup player, would be booked in his final domestic league match beforehand, triggering an investigation into suspicious patterns around his conduct. Cases like that are usually framed purely as a match-fixing risk. But they raise a harder question: what education did that player, and others like him, receive about gambling exposure or integrity long before any investigation began? SIGA’s Universal Standards rightly address the integrity threat. EPIC’s interest sits in the layer beneath it — the wellbeing of players, staff, and fans inside a betting ecosystem faster, more accessible, and more anonymous than at any point in history.
Online gambling has changed the risk. It is available every hour of the day, requires no visible transaction, and can escalate in private, unnoticed by those closest to you. My own addiction was invisible to my wife and team-mates for nearly a decade — a structural feature of how modern gambling is accessed, and why prevention must be built into the system, not bolted on afterwards.
At EPIC Global Solutions, which I founded after a prison sentence connected to my addiction, our model rests on one principle: prevention must come before harm. Roughly half our team carry lived experience of gambling addiction, and we work across sport, gambling, financial services, the armed forces, criminal justice, and youth education, in over 30 countries.
Our partnership with SIGA matters to me personally, not just professionally. SIGA’s Universal Standards and EPIC’s prevention work share one conviction: protecting sport’s integrity and protecting its people are one mission, viewed from two angles. SIGA brings rigorous governance to competition integrity; EPIC brings frontline experience of what gambling harm looks like, and how to intervene before a player, official, or fan crosses into something more damaging. Together we are developing tools, training, and campaigns that treat athlete protection as a core integrity issue, not a peripheral welfare concern.
Gambling harm is not defined by the size of a bet or a bank balance, but by the relationship between the individual and the behaviour. A young academy player betting small amounts in secret can be in more danger than a wealthy fan betting large sums recreationally. This is true across the regulated market – and even more so in unregulated markets.
The World Cup has been watched by billions, many young, forming their first attitudes to betting through a month of tournament marketing. As the trophy is lifted, federations, leagues, and operators have a chance to model something better before the next tournament: transparent partnerships between integrity bodies and harm prevention specialists, education aimed at players before problems emerge, and a conversation about gambling that treats prevention as seriously as detection.
Gambling has been here for 3,000 years, and will be here for the next 3,000 too. The answer is not removing betting from sport, nor is that realistic. It is being honest about the risk, and investing in prevention as seriously as sport invests in anti-doping or match-fixing controls. Every serious gambling disorder I have encountered, including my own, ends in one of four places: bankruptcy, relationship breakdown, criminal conviction, or – in the worst cases – serious mental health issues. Prevention is the only intervention that stops that path.
Nearly 15 years ago I placed my last bet. Everything EPIC does, and everything our partnership with SIGA is building, comes from wanting fewer people to travel the distance I did before someone intervened. As this World Cup closes, it leaves a clear marker to measure against for the next one: protecting sport’s integrity must include protecting the people who play it, support it, and watch it. Prevention is not a footnote to integrity — it is the foundation of it.
– THE END –
Previous Front Line articles
- Front Line Op-Ed: Sport Integrity – The Value of Trust (4 June 2026, Emanuel Macedo de Medeiros)
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Front Line Op-Ed: Trust: Football’s Silent Capital (11 June 2026, Emanuel Macedo de Medeiros)
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Front Line Op-Ed: The Trust Test (18 June 2026, Emanuel Macedo de Medeiros)
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Front Line Op-Ed: Digital Success, IP Protection and Sports Integrity (9 July 2026, Martin Bland)
ABOUT SIGA
SIGA is the world’s leading organisation for Sport Integrity. We are creating a whole new landscape for the sports industry by delivering independent global rating and certification for world Sport to ensure it is governed and operates under the highest integrity standards: The SIGA Universal Standards.
Funded by our Members, SIGA is a non for profit global independent organisation with one aim: To ensure the sport industry is governed under the highest integrity standards so that the values of sport are protected.
SIGA is the only organisation to bring together sport, governments, academia, international organisations, sponsors, business, rights holders, NGOs and professional services companies, from every region in the world, around a common cause of fostering greater integrity throughout sport.
SIGA is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, as a non for-profit association, and comprises of the following continental subsidiaries: SIGA AMERICA, SIGA EUROPE and SIGA LATIN AMERICA.
For more information on SIGA, including its vision, mission and reform agenda, please refer to the website: www.siga-sport.com and FAQs.
To contact SIGA, please email: comms@siga-sport.com.