Mark Davies, managing director at Betfair, said sport administrators are often focused on the wrong target in the fight against corruption.
Speaking at the Global Leaders in Sport conference in Auckland, he said that only participants can fix sporting events and that concentrating the policing efforts on the growth in betting and those involved in it is futile.
Davies called instead for increased information-sharing and cooperation between betting operators and sporting regulatory bodies to identify instances of suspicious betting. “The only way to know whether players are being corrupted is to have the names of the people behind the bets. Any attempts to look at the betting quantum and make judgments on it are absolutely doomed to failure. Sport needs to put itself in a position where it has access to named information, wherever it can get it. If it is not doing that, it is not using the tools available,” he said.
He told 200 delegates from four continents that legal and regulated market offered solutions as opposed to problems and suggested that the reluctance of sport to accept that view hindered the efforts of both sport and gambling operators to weed out corruption.
“I find it amazing that any sporting body would turn down named information from a betting operator willing to provide it with no strings attached, and yet there are plenty which do,” Davies said. “The legal and regulated betting companies around the world want to work with sport, not against it. But they need sports bodies to recognise that it isn’t betting that causes problems, but corruption.”
Speaking to the New Zealand’s Sunday Star-Times following his speach, Davies called for the creation of an anti-corruption body similar to the World Anti-Doping Agency and went on to say: “The idea that corruption must be rooted out is uncontentious. The question is simply how we do it. In my view, agreement on this is hindered because many people think that betting causes corruption. But betting in itself is not corrupt. Corrupt betting is not really betting at all. By definition it is merely getting guaranteed financial reward through securing a fixed outcome, which isn’t the same as having a bet, taking a gamble.”
“As far as I am concerned, either you can be corrupted, or you can’t. If you can’t bribe a sportsman or a group of sportsmen to rig a result, then you can’t get a result fixed. The heart of the problem in the issue of corruption in sport is not betting, but is sportsmen willing to be bought,” he concluded.
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