Roger Federer wants names, and frankly, so do all of us after the start of the Australian Open was dominated by discussion of match-fixing and betting patterns instead of match-winning and baseline patterns.
If you were Craig Tiley, the tournament director of the Australian Open, this was rotten timing. But it was hardly time wasted.
Tennis could use this latest teaching moment. There is no more serious, cynical matter in sports — which seem besieged by the serious and the cynical at the moment — than throwing a match. And according to those who investigate such matters, there is none more difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Therein lies the big limitation of the report published on Monday by the BBC and BuzzFeed that claimed to have uncovered evidence that 16 players ranked in the top 50 during the last decade had repeatedly been flagged to the Tennis Integrity Unit, tennis’ internal watchdog, by betting authorities over suspicions that they had thrown matches.
That list, according to the report, includes a Grand Slam singles winner, and those players apparently play on, eight of them in this Australian Open. But the report did not name names — clearly for legal reasons.
“I would love to hear names,” Federer said after advancing to the second round. “Then at least it’s concrete stuff, and you can actually debate about it. Was it the player? Was it the support team? Who was it? Was it before? Was it a doubles player, a singles player? Which Slam? It’s so all over the place. It’s nonsense to answer something that is pure speculation.”
The speculation is usually based on betting patterns, which can be damning. But betting patterns are, at best, corroborating evidence when it comes to proving corruption. If a tennis player throws a match — or in this spot-betting era, a game or a set — there generally has to be a direct link to a gambler or, to use industry parlance, a corrupter in order to generate a viable case.
“Looking at something and saying, ‘That looks suspicious,’ and actually having evidence are two different things, and suspicious data doesn’t equate to the fact that a player has done something wrong,” said Mark Young, a vice chairman and the chief legal officer of the ATP Tour. “Betting patterns, which people tend to emphasize a great deal, are a source of a red flag to look into something, but they can often easily be explained by people closer to the sport. And when they can’t be explained, it doesn’t equal a corrupt match. And if it does, it doesn’t equal the fact that one of the players themselves is involved.”
What those patterns definitely should equal, however, is plenty of robust activity in the Tennis Integrity Unit, which was formed in 2008 after a surge in suspicious betting activity in tennis.
The constructive question at this stage is whether the unit is functioning as effectively and ethically as it should at a time when gambling on tennis continues to grow — and, most worryingly, to grow at the lowest levels of the professional game, where public interest and institutional oversight are low and the risks of corruption particularly high.
“This is a very tough space for tennis,” said Richard Ings, a former ATP executive who was in charge of the tour’s anti-corruption efforts in the early 2000s. “You have shifting odds at a Mexican challenger. The player losing is South American. The bookie is in London. The bets are placed on a computer in Rome from a betting account in Austria. And I was sitting in the office in Florida.
“Look, suspicious betting patterns happen weekly. Some can be explained by injury or illness or lethargy. Others can’t be. Fixing happens. It’s too easy, too lucrative and too tough to prove for it not to. It happens at all levels. The focus is, is the TIU resourced right with on-site systems? I can’t answer that.”
The investigation by the BBC and BuzzFeed makes the case that the Tennis Integrity Unit needs work, lots of work — that it has failed to pursue suspicious cases aggressively and that it lacks the resources to do a difficult job comprehensively. Tennis officials like Young and the U.S. Tennis Association chief executive, Gordon A. Smith, defend the unit’s work and its approach.
Young said, “I know every one of these reports or betting alerts goes to the TIU, and I’m confident the TIU looks at every one of them.”
But there are clearly legitimate concerns about resources. According to Young, the annual budget for the unit is $2 million. It has six investigators whose job is to cover a truly global sport in which about 120,000 professional matches are played annually. Yes, the unit does get considerable assistance from the betting companies, who have a big interest in preserving the integrity of their system, and from the law enforcement authorities.
But six investigators and $2 million seems low, considering the importance of the issue and the need to monitor the vast and murky world of the lowest-level Futures circuit, and also considering that many of the biggest concerns continue to reside in Eastern European nations, where police cooperation is at its lowest.
The sport has tried to be proactive of late, finally increasing prize money in its minor leagues. But the incentive to cheat to survive remains strong.
“What we’ve learned is gamblers don’t care,” Young said. “Betting on a Challenger match is just as lucrative to them as betting on a Grand Slam match.”
It would seem time to truly flood the zone: Put more boots on the ground in the Futures tour, where live scoring has increased the volume of betting and spot betting. It also seems smart to increase the educational outreach on the junior circuit.
For now, the integrity unit gives presentations to juniors at some of the Grand Slam events, including the Australian Open, but there needs to be more interaction with juniors at the national level, above all in countries where the integrity unit knows the corruption risks are the highest.
There is also the transparency issue, which is trickier than it first seems, because what might seem like innocuous information worth releasing publicly to outsiders could be news that insiders could use.
There is oversight. All four of the game’s governing bodies — the International Tennis Federation, the WTA Tour, the ATP and the Grand Slam tournaments — have officers who monitor the integrity unit. There are quarterly reports and internal accountability.
But the cone of silence is still too thick. Ideally, there would be a way to release more information on suspicious cases that are examined and then dismissed. But at the very least, in this time of legitimate skepticism about the integrity of sports federations and officials, the integrity unit should regularly publish some general figures to give a better sense of the scope of its activities.
If we can’t have names until players are penalized, at least give us grounds for more faith.
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