The topic for day 3 of SIW2021 was Sports Betting Integrity and the day ended with three relevant panels: Esports, Governance and Integrity: The Critical Challenges; Roll the Dice: Integrity Concerns for Operators, and Sports Betting USA: Place your Bets.
Don’t miss the chance to watch on-demand.
Day 1 / Part 1/2
Day 1 / Part 2/2
Day 2 /Part 1/2
Day 2 /Part 2/2
Day 3 /Part 1/2
Esports, Governance and Integrity: The Critical Challenges
(Watch Here)
Ian Smith, Commissioner, Esports Integrity Coalition, ESIC moderated a panel that focused on the acceleration of Esports during the global pandemic, resulting from the diminished range of traditional mainstream Sport available.
For years, Esports has been the fastest growing sport, reaching millions of people around the world. Integrity, is, of course, an issue: there is match-fixing, physical doping, software doping, and more. What mechanisms are being implemented to prevent frauds in an industry that distributed nearly $1 billion in prize money to its top players?
Anna Baumann, Executive Vice President Esports, ReKTGlobal
“10 years ago 2 000 euros a month would be a fantastic salary for Esports players. Nowadays we hear about transfers, and we know about them in league of legends, going up to the seven figures mark. It’s quite impressive the jump Esports made over the past three to four years. This brings credibility as a relevant issue. It is really core to everything. What damage will it make if bad regulation result on bad Esports? The publishers have to be an active part on finding integrity solutions, for their own protection. I am also a big believer in the great ecosystems that have been created in the open model, because the market regulates itself, and the consumers decide whether there has been an ecosystem being built with third parties watching over it. Counter-strike is a brilliant example: you have regulatory bodies emerging and taking care of the urgent matters at hand. So, I would say both ecosystems or both approaches are great if done well”.
Vlad Marinescu, President, International Esports Federation
“How do you separate or make the difference between Esport and traditional sport? I don’t see big of a difference in terms of the respect that should be accorded, but I can tell you that our community is one of the freshest and youngest, and most dynamic communities there is because Esports has absolutely no borders, not physical ones and not demographic ones in terms of age or religion or sex or gender or nationality. The differences can come from the game that you play, so first-person shooter gamers are different types of communities than the communities of, let’s say, mental games or league of legends, or any other sports simulation. They are, however, joined together in the same umbrella, the IESF, which was founded in 2008 and now has 109 national federations as members. We are, however, unorganized and our ecosystem is yet to be defined. We are very wild west, have to find a way to unite the entire ecosystem for the benefit of creating sustainable models that can benefit the players and the athletes, and ensure most importantly that we’re learning from the traditional sports. The market must be united, not to duplicate activities. We also need to instil integrity principles whether for match-fixing, physical doping or even software/technological doping”.
Ralf Reichert, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, ESL Gaming
“When we started we thought actually that football is a great system, and we were just going to copy football in the digital world. We thought this was going to work, so what we did was to build up this league
system where you could progress from one league to the other. Then, what became apparent is that in esports because there are no boundaries, everyone can play with everyone, while in traditional sports you have to meet at one physical. What is probably the more impressive number is how many people watch Esports: around 170 million people have watched ESL competitions live last year”.
Tyler Schrodt, Founder, Electronic Gaming Federation (EGF)
“Colleges and high schools are trying to understand how to take the best practices into this new world, in order make the world feel safe. On the other side, working with players that may have never been part of a formalized competition structure is really helping them understand what it is to put those standards into place. We also educate everyone to learn how to look for the different risk factors or red flags that ultimately lead to lack of integrity. I hope that the education of participants will play an important role to deterrent to corrupt behaviour. It’s not that people want to be corrupt, they’re often inadvertently corrupt, but when it comes to betting there’s an awful lot of work to be done”.
Roll the Dice: Integrity Concerns for Operators
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No matter how solid and reliable sport governing bodies are in each country, safeguarding the integrity of Sports is a continual process. Betting companies are one of the major stakeholders in the industry, so there is a clear and indisputable need to implement effective mechanisms to improve and uphold Sports Betting Integrity. As is always the case cost-value and risk-reward determinations are required whenever a significant and implementable cultural change is being considered. What is being done by the operators?
David Conn, Journalist and Author, Guardian News & Media, moderated this panel.
Jake Marsh, Global Head of Integrity, Stats Perform
“Many studies have shown links between poorly paid athletes and vulnerability to match-fixing. It would, however, be negligent not to apply the same risk management to the top levels of sport. At top level football there have been suspicious matches. In England we end up sitting in this bubble, and everything’s okay as the premier league’s fine. In other top competitions elsewhere in the world that might not be the case. There are issues, and that is linked to funding of the competitions, to poor governance. The International Betting Integrity Association have done a study on the types of sports and the volumes of issues and suspicious matches: it comes out 0.003 to 0.006 of all matches played. That is a healthy balance, but the point is that those matches will always happen, so we have to have the defences and the monitoring capabilities.”
Joaquim Evangelista, President, Portuguese Professional Football Players Union (SJPF)
“With the pandemic, clubs and players have more economic problems. We see bankruptcies around the world, less professionalism, a lot of investors entering football without scrutiny. We need to regard the balance between economic stability and the integrity of sport. We have problems with the young players. In Portugal, the betting companies are too aggressive and we have a lot of problems with youth addiction. There is a lack of cooperation between the stakeholders in sport. We need to work together in educational programmes, and those must be supported by the betting companies. I disagree that betting companies are allowed to use former players to advertise, because they have media impact. Sport is not only about numbers and data. We must keep values in Sport.”
Gabino Oliveira, President, Portuguese Association of Online Sports Gaming and Betting (APAJO)
“The betting industry needs to protect their business. They need to protect the consumer and of course they need to protect sports. They on their own, apart from sports integrity units and other integrity associations, analyse suspicious patterns in their sportsbook, they have an a network of informants from the law enforcement, and also from the match-fixing world. This allows them to understand which possible events are at risk and, of course, to validate if there’s suspicious activity, if there is something really going on that needs to reported back to the to the authorities. Joaquim Evangelista mentioned a few problems he is facing. Responsible gambling is always a concern, and an active topic within the industry”.
Carlos Romero, Integrity Data Analyst, LaLiga
“At LaLiga we monitor all the matches for professional football and non-professional football with the help of data, and our worry is to identify the anomalous or suspicious movements in the betting market. When needed, we send alerts to our partners, like Starts Perform, for example, to see if they also find something wrong is happening. In the betting markets we have to alert the local institutions, and then proceed in accordance. We work with software that allows us, for instance, to check the individual performance of each player. We can see if some run less than the others, and we found some cases on the first and second divisions.”
Sports Betting USA: Place your Bets
(Watch Here)
The repeal of PASPA brought to the US a new world of betting in Sports. With opportunity to cash in, comes the risk of eroding the integrity of US Sport. This panel focused on what needs to be done to protect the integrity of sport and the betting industry, from the leagues running professional sports, to the athletes and coaches, from college to professional level, on and off the field of play and what the newly established SIGA AMERICA has in the pipeline.
Emanuel Medeiros, Global CEO, SIGA, moderated this panel.
Marquest Meeks, Senior Counsel, Sports Betting and Compliance Director, State Government Relations, MLB
“Major League Baseball, like other major Sports, took the approach that anytime you put gambling and money around something there’s always an increased risk for corruption. So, the initial stance of baseball was that sports betting shouldn’t be legalized. After the supreme court’s decision, we could either put our head in the sand and pretend this isn’t a thing, or we could be thinking about the ways we think that laws should be drafted, and regulations should be put in place to help protect the integrity of our games. For the past three or four years now, MLB, with other Major Leagues in the US, have been advocating, state to state, to highlight the things that we think should be in-laws. For sure, there are economic benefits not only to sports leagues, but to our member clubs, but we are always trying to balance that, because every thought we have about the legalized sports betting space begins and ends with making sure that we can protect the integrity of our games. We’re still on the runway, and have yet to take off. We have internal sports betting integrity policy, which limits, employees, players, club staff, from betting on baseball or softball. If I step out in my backyard and I put together a quick game with my nephews, nobody can bet on that. That’s our first line of defense, but then we actively advocate in state legislators for an integrity tool kit”.
Matt Zarb-Cousin, Co-Founder & Director of External Affairs, Gamban
“Between 60 and 80 per cent of the profits from online gambling are coming from the 5 per cent of people that either have problems with gambling or are at risk. It is a business model that is unfortunately built on people losing more money than they can afford to. The reason that they advertise in and around sports is because sport is a very effective customer acquisition method. Gamban is a gambling blocking software. It blocks access to gambling sites and apps, and it’s designed to be as difficult to remove as possible. Since the lockdown and the cancellation of sports fixtures, slots and casinos online cross-sales grew. If you are betting in football, on the next throw in, that’s very easy to fix if you are a player, because you can just kick the ball out straight away. There must be restrictions on the kind of bet that can be offered”.
Marc Riccio, CEO, USA Lacrosse
“As they come into the United States, European operators are very sophisticated. They had had many years of experience behind them in terms of integrity and the value of official data, and all the checks and balances that are needed to establish consumer trust. They have aligned interest with the consumer in that if a consumer loses trust in that sports booker they will not hand their money over to that sport. The challenge in the US is to educate the marketplace on the role of data, on the role of integrity, and checks and balances, to maintain consumer trust”.
Oliver Jaberg, Deputy Chief Legal & Compliance Officer, Director of Integrity & Anti-Doping, FIFA
“Match-fixing and match manipulation is a threat that not only undermines the integrity and credibility of sports, including soccer, but, also and importantly, provides organized crime networks with the opportunity to infiltrate sport. That allows organized crime to attempt to corrupt players, referees and officials, in order to manipulate matches to gain massive illegal profits. Compared to other criminal activities, it is also important to know that match-fixing is an area of high profit and relatively low risk for criminals. It is important to understand also that the members of these organized crime networks are connected globally, and tend to regularly engage in changing their location and operation. That makes it extremely important to think outside of one single sport and outside of one single country. Football is the largest sport by betting volume, with around a 50 per cent share of the whole sport betting market, and the options are almost endless. Match-fixing syndicates try to take advantage of that. We need a three-pillar approach: educating and raising awareness; engaging in cooperation with different stakeholders, including betting operators, law enforcement agencies, international organizations and other private organizations, such as SIGA; and going after the wrongdoers under sport disciplinary movement, as well as law enforcement agencies to prosecute these cases”.
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SIGA is the world´s largest coalition in the field of sport´s governance and integrity. Supported by more than 100 international multi-industry supporters, SIGA is an independent and neutral organisation whose mission is to bring about meaningful reforms and enhance the integrity of all sports through a set of universal standards operated by an independent and neutral body. 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. Click on the hyperlinks for the list of SIGA Members and Committed Supporters and SIGA Partners.
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