NEW YORK – ESPN sports betting journalist David Purdum put up a Twitter poll in October 2017 that asked a simple question: “Do you believe a game in the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL has been compromised for gambling purposes in the last 10 years?”
Sixty-eight percent of the more than 3,600 respondents said they did.
Regardless of that result, a panel of specialists on sports integrity concluded, during a discussion Tuesday at ICE Sports Betting USA, that the issue is not nearly so dire.
“Governing bodies, particularly in Europe, have realized that they need to be more transparent in communicating issues that arise,” Perform Group’s Jake Marsh said.
The panel, which Purdum moderated, included Marsh alongside representatives from the NBA, the PGA, SportRadar, and ESSA.
The NBA’s Dan Spillane said that the first responsibility of the commissioner, as outlined in the league’s bylaws, is to protect the integrity of the game and to “maintain public confidence” in the game. The league, he continued, has strong rules and the “strongest possible consequences” for violating those rules.
SportRadar’s Andy Cunningham said that it’s been “very refreshing to see some sports organizations who didn’t have those (integrity pillars) in place since the Supreme Court decision that legalized sports betting are now implementing integrity programs.”
If suspicious activity is detected, Cunningham said, SportsRadar has a team of experts from the industry who drill into the data and report anything that looks suspicious.
“These guys know what suspicious betting looks like,” he said.
ESSA’s Khalid Ali said that his organization, a non-profit, was created to share information, both among providers and among athletes.
“This gets to the grass roots,” he said. “We set up an education program 10 years ago with players associations across Europe. It was surprising how little players knew about betting. It’s now been rolled out to 15,000 athletes across Europe. Not just young players, but players coming to the ends of their careers, too. That’s a vulnerability.”
Ali said that ESSA has established an anonymous “red button” program wherein any player approached by a gambler can report the incident, no strings attached.
In 2017, ESSA reported 266 suspicious events, most of which involved tennis. There were four in the U.S., none of which involved the major sports.
“The percentage that has been fixed is tiny,” Ali said. “It’s probably .001 percent. But the perception is distorted. When a match-fixing scandal happens, it’s not just on the back page, it’s on the front page.”
Cunningham said that SportsRadar monitors more than 400,000 matches across 20 different sports yearly, and the amount of deemed worth reporting to partners is roughly 0.5 percent.
PGA Senior Vice President for Tour Administration Andy Levinson spoke in favor of a federal framework for information sharing, saying in part, “we think the solution for protecting the integrity of our competition is some sort of central repository of information, where all of the operators are required to provide bettor-level data, and there is an open sharing of information.”
Doing so, he said, would provide a holistic view of all betting activity while removing any obligation from either the states or the federal government.
“The technology to create that (sort of database) absolutely exists today,” Cunningham said.
The NBA’s Spillane reiterated his league’s desire for a quarter-percentage point of each bet placed “on our games, to be paid to us, as compensation for us providing the product and (for) the risks that we take on.” Spillane pointed out that the NBA wants this for all leagues.
“We’re working on that along with Major League Baseball and with the PGA tour,” he said.
Continuing a theme that ran through many of the panels presented at the conference, Spillane’s support of an integrity fee – of any type – was met with vocal resistance.
“The European Commission did a study of (integrity fees) in 2014 and said it was not an effective model,” Ali said. “There are other models to be used – the model that the NBA is currently using, with these partnership agreements. Trying to take a cut from the operators hasn’t been proven effective.”
Conflicts about integrity fees to the side, Spillane’s words seemed to ultimately sum up the general philosophy of the panel members.
“There are a lot of areas of alignment between sports and casinos and other betting operators. No one wants to have a scandal or an incident that undermines confidence,” he said. “We’re in the new world. Sports betting is the goal in the U.S. But that doesn’t change the mission.
“We just have to turn the dial up on the things that we’ve been doing for a long time.”
