On November 11, 2016, under the bright lights of the Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane, South Africa, the home side prepared to face Group D rival Senegal in a qualifying match for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. South Africa had not beaten Senegal since January 2015. This was a game they had to win to make it to the finals.
The match started slowly. The first 42 minutes were goalless, and neither team looked likely to score, when a South African player found some space and took a shot at the Senegalese goal. The ball clearly deflected off defender Kalidou Koulibaly’s knee, but the referee, a Ghanaian named Joseph Lamptey, awarded South Africa a penalty, signalling that Koulibaly had handled the ball.
Defender Thulani Hlatshwayo slotted the ball past Senegalese keeper Abdoulaye Diallo, and, emboldened by their sudden change of luck, the South Africans surged forward. Within minutes they had scored again. A second-half Senegalese goal wasn’t enough. The home side finished the match as victors, claiming second place in the qualifying group.
Watching the game that evening was Tom Mace, a Londoner who worked for sports betting company Sportradar as director of global operations integrity services, a department designed to monitor suspicious betting activity. Mace’s team uses crawler software, dubbed the Fraud Detection System (FDS), which pulls together pre-match data from more than 550 bookmakers on six continents – Asia, Australia, the Americas, Africa and Europe – and includes huge betting sites such as Bet365 and Betfred. By monitoring how live bets are placed, compared to the pre-calculated predicted odds for a match, Mace and his team can spot unusual betting patterns, which are often indicative of match fixing.
Since 2009, Sportradar has recorded 4,145 sports matches as being manipulated. The Integrity team has also assisted criminal investigations carried out by Interpol and local police authorities against gangs of fixers – cases that can put investigators at risk of violent revenge attacks.
During the South African qualifier, Mace noticed signs of suspicious betting from the 12th minute until the first goal in the 43rd minute, at which point the activity ceased. Convinced that Lamptey was complicit – his dubious handball was a very suggestive signal, later backed up by the data – Mace’s team analysed the data and, 72 hours later, reported the match to FIFA. Based on the report, FIFA opened an investigation. Mace appeared before the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport to provide evidence in early 2017.
As Mace explained to prosecutors, the FDS had picked up suspicious betting activity related to the number of goals predicted to be scored. Usually, Mace explained, the odds for a total of three goals being scored would increase during the match, because as the time remaining diminishes, as does the time available for either team to score the required three goals. In this instance, the odds movements were irrational because they implied the same probability of three goals materialising after 40 minutes as at the start of the match.
FIFA didn’t require the corroboration of witness testimony, evidence of money flow, or a confession to find Lamptey guilty of breaching its disciplinary code by unlawfully influencing match results. Lamptey was banned for life, and, while there was no suggestion the South African team was involved in illegal activity, the match was rescheduled for November 2017. This time, Senegal won 2-0, qualifying for its first World Cup tournament in 16 years.
“Credit to FIFA, they took us seriously,” Mace says. Unlike most of the cases that Mace had worked on — predominantly on lower league games without the scrutiny of live television – Lamptey had been far from subtle, playing out his dubious refereeing in front of an international audience. “This was a big match; [professional referees] don’t make mistakes like that,” Mace says. “It takes a lot of balls to do this on live TV.”
Sportradar's headquarters is in Munich – the office is a short S-Bahn ride from the airport and is furnished in dark wood and glass, with signed German and Spanish football shirts on display. In late February 2019, we're greeted by Andreas Krannich, who is managing director of the company’s Integrity services. Dressed in a pressed white shirt, bright blue jeans and tan slip-ons, he has the appearance and mannerisms of a German Woody Harrelson.
The FDS collects betting data from more than 550 regulated, unregulated and black market bookmakers worldwide – including Europe’s Unibet, Africa’s Betika.com and 16 of Asia’s unregulated bookmakers. Currently, the Integrity team monitors more than 20 sports worldwide.
There is a huge incentive for offering odds on such obscure sporting events; for legal and illegal bookmakers alike, there are hundreds of billions of Euros to be earned each year. The sports betting market is worth €1.47 trillion every year; Europe is responsible for €309.5bn of this, the US accounts for €147bn and Africa contributes €9.5bn. Those numbers, however, are small compared to Asia’s annual turnover of €950bn.
In the eighties, says Krannich, high-street bookmakers would only offer bets on local football matches, with three possible outcomes: a home win, a draw or an away win. From 1994, changes in legislation around the world and the development of online gambling software meant that punters could now bet on anything, anywhere, anytime. As such, well-established bookmakers like William Hill and Ladbrokes had to adapt and also offer odds on most sports across the world.
“To keep up, you have to offer things like second division Argentinian basketball,” Krannich says. “It might be less than 0.8 per cent of your books, but you have to offer it to prevent the customers from going elsewhere.”
However, bookmakers had no way of monitoring and offering accurate and fair odds on all the available bets. It was only later, in 2001, that a Norwegian startup called Market Monitor launched a tool that was capable of doing precisely that. Called Betradar, the software used crawler technology to aggregate odds from more than 280 bookmakers across the globe. For the first time bookmakers were able to access a vast pool of shared data, with the odds on any match automatically calculated on their behalf by Betradar. This not only saved them time, it helped eliminate the financial risk of accidentally offering overly generous odds.
Betradar was a success. In 2002, Market Monitor was contracted by the International Sports Information Europe to provide its betting data; in 2004, it won 18 national football lottery contracts. But its breakthrough only came in 2005, in the aftermath of a scandal that rocked world football.
On August 21, 2004, Bundesliga heavyweights Hamburg played second division team Paderborn in the first round of the German DFB Cup. In the 13th minute, Hamburg midfielder Christian Rahn put Hamburg ahead; 17 minutes later, striker Emile Mpenza made the score two-nil. Five minutes later, the referee, 25-year-old Robert Hoyzer, sent off Mpenza for a routine tackle. The striker angrily protested the decision – it was the only red card of his career – but to no avail. Shortly after, Hoyzer made another controversial decision, awarding Paderborn a penalty kick, which striker Guido Spork comfortably sent into the bottom left corner.
Then, in the 83rd minute, Paderborn forward Alexander Löbe fell and rolled into the Hamburg box after missing a pass from a teammate. Hoyzer did not hesitate to award another penalty. Spork lined up the shot and scored again. Paderborn won that match 4-2. Hamburg, the Bundesliga favourites, were sent crashing out of the tournament in its first stage.
In January 2005, four German referees contacted the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB) governing body, claiming that Hoyzer had approached them to fix matches. The four officials claimed they could prove that a German Cup match and four games in the second division had been manipulated by Hoyzer to profit from illegal gambling. Such claims tallied with the DFB’s own suspicions: unusually high bets had been placed on the Paderborn-Hamburg match with Germany’s largest betting firm, Oddset, indicating a level of interest not usually witnessed in a first-round match.
That month, the DFB formally accused Hoyzer of match-fixing. After initially denying the charges, he made a full and public confession, in which he admitted “the allegations against me are basically true” and apologised to “German football federation, my referee colleagues and football fans”. Hoyzer admitted fixing matches alongside Croatian mafia member Ante Sapina who, along with his brothers Milan and Filip, co-ordinated play from their underworld cafe in Berlin’s Rankestrasse district. To control the fix, Sapina would call Hoyzer in his dressing room at half time with instructions – often demanding a penalty be awarded. Once, Sapina even texted Hoyzer during the match, offering him €50,000 to fix the game in his favour. In total, Sapina made more than £1 million, including more than £500,000 from the Paderborn win. Meanwhile, Hoyzer’s haul for fixing a total of nine matches was £45,000, plus a new television.
During the investigation, linesman Felix Zwayer and another witness were placed in protective custody to prevent any potential repercussions from Sapina and his associates. Ten months later, in November 2005, Sapina was handed a jail sentence of two years and five months. His brothers received suspended sentences of 16 and 12 months. Hoyzer, meanwhile, was banned for life by the German FA and jailed for two years and five months. Hoyzer’s actions had significant repercussions.
In Germany, the DFB received a battery of complaints from teams that had been affected by Hoyzer’s refereeing. Hamburg was awarded €500,000 in compensation. Klaus Toppmöller, who had been fired as Hamburg’s coach a few games after the Paderborn match, was never rehired, going without work for two years before ending his career as coach of the Georgia national side. "The referee cost me my job,” he later said. “We were doing fine until the loss against Paderborn. Then everything went downhill.”
With Germany set to host the 2006 World Cup, the world press covered the Hoyzer scandal extensively. The Independent wrote that it cast a shadow over preparations for the tournament. The Guardian called the scandal an embarrassment. FIFA ordered the German Football Association and Bundesliga to take action to ensure such a scandal would not reoccur. When the controversy broke, Andreas Krannich was working for the Bundesliga as its sales director for audio rights and new media. “The president of the German FA and Bundesliga asked me to tell them everything I knew about sports betting, but I was completely blind,” Krannich says. “Like most Germans I had little to no knowledge of sports betting, legal or otherwise.”
It was around that time that Krannich was contacted by the CEO of Market Monitor, Carsten Koerl, who realised that his crawler software could be adapted to detect illegal gambling by monitoring live betting patterns. Using the Hamburg match as a hypothetical example, Koerl claimed his software would have detected a spike in bets favouring Paderborn just before Hoyzer awarded the first penalty. The fact that the suspicious bets preceded the penalty would indicate that whoever placed the bet had prior knowledge of what was about to happen on the pitch.
In 2005, Market Monitor partnered with the German Football Association to launch the Fraud Detection System, the early warning system that could immediately detect suspicious betting activity. “When I first heard what Koerl’s software could do, I didn’t believe it,” Krannich says. Two years after the World Cup, he left the Bundesliga to join Koerl’s company, by then renamed Sportradar. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about football, and that it was impossible to predict odds based on maths. Koerl quickly changed my mind.”
Today, Sportradar’s Integrity service monitors bookmakers across 120 countries, processing more than five billion data sets a day – the equivalent of monitoring 300,000 sports matches per year. This is primarily for clients including the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and UEFA, for whom it monitors 31,000 football matches per year.
It is in the London office – the unofficial headquarters of the FDS operation – that the majority of these data sets are processed. In one of two main rooms, screens show live sporting matches from around the world. In another, young analysts sit in front of rows of screens, monitoring live data from ongoing matches. Tom Mace, a tall man dressed in black jeans and a blue denim shirt, describes the FDS process.
On any given weekday, he says, the team in London might have nearly 400 football matches to monitor. On a busy weekend that can be more than 500. For every match, the FDS algorithm uses data collected from its network of bookmakers, historical statistics on the performance of both teams, and live data including team roster, inclement weather conditions, any current injuries in either team. Based on that input, it then estimates odds – so called ‘calculated odds’ – on which team should win and what the score is likely to be.
These odds are represented on screen as a curve on a graph with ‘time’ on the x-axis and ‘odds’ on the y-axis, Mace explains. He points to a second line on that graph, depicting the bookies’ odds – which change as the match progresses. These two lines should coincide with each other. If, however, the bookies’ odds, significantly deviate from the calculated odds, a first alert will be triggered. This discrepancy might be easy to explain – has one team suddenly brought on a star striker? Has the other team’s first-choice goalkeeper been carried off the pitch after suffering an asthma attack, leaving his unproven understudy to take over? Has one team had two key players sent off after an on-pitch scuffle, leaving them with nine players? Only when no reasonable explanation can account for the difference between the odds will they then start considering the possibility of corruption.
Few incidents play out on live television in front of an international audience like the Lamptey and Hoyzer cases. “Often, to avoid such obvious scrutiny, gangs of fixers will focus their attention on lower league games which are not frequently televised, if at all,” Mace says.
Consider the example of second division Romanian side Gloria Buzău. Over the 2014-15 season, after the team lost a string of matches by conceding easy goals, the Romanian Federation became increasingly suspicious that they were fixing games by allowing their opponents to score.
“This is a typical match-fixing set up,” Mace says. “A second division team in a not-very high-profile league that was struggling to attract spectators or sponsorship. The players weren’t being paid a salary, so you can see how they might have been coerced into match fixing. In this case it was directed by the club owner.”
In this instance, Costin Negraru, a former investigative journalist then working with the Romanian Football Federation (and now a member of the Sportradar Integrity team) attended a number of Gloria Buzău matches and secretly filmed the team’s performance. Negraru was working on behalf of the RFF, which already had its own suspicions about the team.
One such recording captures the team’s run down Buzău stadium with less than a dozen spectators scattered between the stands. One of the coaches is subtly using his phone on a bench. Then, the head coach gives a hand signal, communicating two goals must be conceded. The coach holds a water bottle out, which, according to subsequent testimony from the players, meant there were new instructions to be received. A player approaches the coach, takes a swig, and listens to his instructions. A few minutes later in the game, an opponent skips past a static Gloria Buzău defence, shoots, and the shot rolls past the keeper who reacts just a moment too late to stop it.
Alongside this video evidence, a number of players later gave instrumental witness testimonies. “It was scary how much it matched up,” Mace says. “We had betting data showing one match only began acting suspiciously from the second half onward, and testimony from one of the players who said that the coach came in at half time and told them that they had to lose the second half by two goals. That was exactly what we were seeing in the odds data.”
Gloria Buzău were fixing the match in real-time, fixing matches at the moments when the odds were most favourable. “If you agree something up front, you have the potential that it might go wrong,” Mace says. “If you agree to win by three, but the first goal goes in the wrong way, you’ve got a problem. If you’re a bit more adaptable, you can maximise the market.” Following the investigation, the Romanian Football Federation imposed bans on three coaches and 14 players ranging from two months and two years. Coach Viorel Ion and his assistant coaches were fined £33,983 each.
Of course, not every case is as cut and dry. “The hardest part [of monitoring matches] is taking the relevant data from our huge data lake and connecting it to the relevant fixers,” Krannich says. “It’s an ever-evolving process.”
In 2013, Europe coordinated an investigation across 13 countries, exposing a criminal network of 425 match officials, players and career criminals suspected of fixing more than 380 professional football matches, including European Championship qualifiers and Champions League clashes. According to Hungarian investigator Bajan Nemeth, a Singapore-based betting syndicate is behind the fixes. “[A] Hungarian syndicate member ... was in direct touch with referees who could attempt to influence the result in games where they were in charge all across the globe. Accomplices would then place bets online or by phone with bookmakers in Asia," Nemeth said at the Hague in 2013.
Meanwhile, in January 2019, Spanish authorities working with Europol arrested 83 people – including 23 professional tennis players – following an investigation into match fixing. In a mammoth operation, Spanish police raided 11 properties, recovering £151,000 in cash, five luxury cars and a shotgun.
Sportradar’s Integrity service, meanwhile, has worked closely to monitor the match-fixing activities of Albanian football club Skënderbeu, a team that regularly qualifies for UEFA competitions. “I started writing reports on Skënderbeu when I arrived at Sportradar in 2010,” Mace says. “It’s still ongoing. They’re a serious outfit, with an intimate knowledge of betting markets, and how to maximise profit.”
Instead of match-fixing by controlling how many goals they lost by, Skënderbeu would often fix the last 15 minutes of a match, conceding an against-the-odds last-minute goal in order to turn a profit but still win the match. Mace recalls a Champions League qualifying match in 2015 against Crusaders, the Northern Ireland champions. In the final minutes of the game, Skënderbeu were comfortably ahead when, out of nowhere, the Albanians allowed an opponent past their defence to score an easy goal. The referee, however, flagged him offside. A few minutes later, the situation repeated itself. On the third attempt, the Crusaders finally scored a legitimate goal. Watching it was like seeing a professional football team suddenly lose all ability to play.
Skënderbeu has featured in 53 BFDS reports between November 2010 and April 2016, and UEFA eventually banned Skënderbeu in the 2016-17 season. In 2018, with the help of the Integrity team, UEFA pushed for a longer, ten year suspension. The new investigation saw thousands of fans gathering in the streets of Korçë, Albania, to protest the club’s innocence. The ban was granted in March 2018, along with a fine of €1 million. Corruption at Skënderbeu was believed to be prevalent at all levels of the club, from players to coaches and management, with team president Ardjan Takaj accused of masterminding the operation. The UEFA report concluded that Skenderbeu “has been fixing football matches like nobody has ever done before in the history of the game” and alleges the club has “essentially operated as a vehicle for organised crime”.
The team is currently appealing the decision. Meanwhile, several UEFA investigators received death threats over the course of the 2018 investigation. Despite this, the work must continue. “We’re here for a reason,” Mace says. “Not just because our partners want to have good PR around their integrity. We’re here to make cases and ban people. That won’t change.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
