With the vast sums of money involved in these betting markets, there is the risk that the World Cup will be targeted by spot fixing, the practice of manipulating events within a game \u2014 rather than the overall result \u2014 in order to cheat the bookmakers. An example might be a player deliberately receiving a yellow card in a particular window of time in a game.<\/p>\n
How serious is the threat of spot fixing at the tournament? The Athletic can reveal that at least two players at the World Cup, representing different nations, have been reported by independent integrity experts to the national federations where they play their club football on suspicion of spot fixing.<\/p>\n
One case, from earlier this season, involves a player who allegedly deliberately received a yellow card in a league match to ensure the resulting suspension would be served before a big upcoming derby, guaranteeing their availability.<\/p>\n
However, this scheme was discussed widely enough in advance to lead to an unusually high level of stakes on his booking \u2014 leading to the match being flagged by monitoring systems. The incident, and the betting patterns around it, was also reported to the relevant country\u2019s national federation. The Athletic asked the country\u2019s FA whether the case was being actively investigated but they did not respond to multiple requests for comment.<\/p>\n
The second case was triggered by an alert last month, when, in emails seen by The Athletic, two separate bookmakers reported suspicious betting activity. The bets had been placed on a player receiving a card during the first half of a league game; the player was booked after committing three fouls in fewer than five first-half minutes. A well-placed source, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, confirmed that the case had been reported to the integrity unit of the appropriate national federation.<\/p>\n
The Athletic is not naming either player so as not to compromise any investigation.<\/p>\n
Asked if match-fixing had been discussed as a potential issue in advance of the tournament, FIFA responded: \u201cFIFA has a zero-tolerance policy against match manipulation and provides a dedicated, highly secure and web-based whistleblowing system so that individuals can report any form or knowledge of potential match manipulation or integrity-related misconduct.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sports integrity experts warn that spot fixing, while not always effecting the overall outcome of a sporting event, can represent the top of a slippery slope to ever more serious fixes.<\/p>\n
\u201cA player might think that yellow cards don\u2019t affect the game as such, but the problem is that they\u2019re a starting point,\u201d says Chris Kronow Rasmussen, an independent expert in international match-fixing. \u201cIt\u2019s the start of your career in fixing \u2014 it might be another yellow card next time, then it might be nine corners, then something more, for your teammates to help you concede three goals or more. These people have leverage over you, they can blackmail you to keep you fixing games.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first recorded fix is documented on a tattered roll of papyrus dating from 267AD.<\/p>\n
Demetrius, a teenage wrestler appearing in the 138th Great Antinoeia, a set of religious games in Egypt, agrees in this contract \u201cto fall three times and yield\u201d. According to the scroll\u2019s translator, King\u2019s College London professor Dominic Rathbone, he will be paid 3,800 drachmas \u2014 roughly the cost of a donkey.<\/p>\n
Over the next 1700 years, the stakes have increased, but the practice has remained the same; stories consuming some of sport\u2019s highest profile figures \u2014 the Chicago White Sox, Sonny Liston, South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje.<\/p>\n
In the 2020s, the number of investigations have only accelerated, powered by an explosion in online gambling. Advertisements for online gambling platforms can be seen at almost every sporting event and most broadcasters and media outlets, including The Athletic, take betting sponsorship.<\/p>\n
Recent months have brought a slew of high-profile integrity investigations across global sport.<\/p>\n
In November, the NBA was rocked by an FBI investigation which led to 34 people being charged in illegal gambling schemes<\/a>, including current players and coaches Chauncey Billups, Damon Jones, Terry Rozier, and Jontay Porter. In mid-January, federal prosecutors charged 26 men with alleged conspiracy to manipulate basketball games<\/a> at college level. Also in November, Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were accused of receiving bribes to rig their pitches<\/a>. All those involved deny wrongdoing.<\/p>\n \n Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz arrives for his arraignment at court in New York (Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n In a long-running and ongoing probe in Turkey<\/a>, over 1,000 players from across the country\u2019s football leagues were suspended along with 149 referees and assistants, with dozens arrested. This March, Czech police opened a criminal investigation<\/a> after identifying 47 cases of suspected bribery and match-fixing in the country\u2019s football leagues, while four footballers in Australia were convicted of offences this winter<\/a> (a fifth, Ulises Davila, a former Chelsea player, pled guilty to fixing-related charges and was fined<\/a>).<\/p>\n Over the past eight months, The Athletic has investigated the scale of match-fixing in modern sport, especially in football, the world\u2019s most popular game, and tennis, one of its most vulnerable fronts. Upcoming articles will detail exactly how a fix works, the industry\u2019s relationship with organised crime, and whether those claiming to protect sport have become part of its problems.<\/p>\n In the course of this reporting, The Athletic has uncovered:<\/p>\n That two players going to the World Cup have been reported to the national federations where they play their club football because of suspicions of spot fixing \u201cI\u2019m not surprised,\u201d says one former integrity chief at one of the world\u2019s most high-profile sporting bodies, speaking anonymously in order share their opinions candidly. \u201cOur athletes are financial instruments of the betting industry.\u201d<\/p>\n There are many forms of fixing, but broadly, it works as follows: an organised group will scour the betting market to identify potentially favourable odds. They will then employ a mule, or middle-man, to target individuals involved in the game. This could be players, coaches, or referees.<\/p>\n Once recruited, the exact nature of what they are asked to do can change. Sometimes, the result of a match is at stake \u2014 players may be asked to ensure they lose the upcoming game, for example. Historically, this was always the most common technique, with punters predominantly betting on the final result of contests.<\/p>\n However, as betting has become more sophisticated, supercharged by the rise of the digital betting industry, so have the fixers. It is now possible to bet on almost any aspect of a sporting contest \u2014 the scorers of the first goal, winner of the first set, number of yellow cards, even the colour of a team\u2019s socks. Fixing these elements of a match is known as spot fixing, which is now the most rampant form of manipulation across the globe.<\/p>\n The Group of Copenhagen are on the frontline against the fixers. A network of national platforms fighting manipulation, together they advise and inform the Macolin Convention \u2014 a multilateral treaty organised by the Council of Europe, which seeks to address fixing by changing international law. Their monitoring system is one of the most sophisticated in the world.<\/p>\n Their numbers demonstrate just how widespread that fixing is. The Athletic has seen the group\u2019s database of suspicious football matches between January and late November 2025. The definition of a suspicious betting pattern differs between regulators, but broadly, it refers to when the gambling market evolves in a highly illogical way, with corruption a plausible explanation as to why it defies normal betting behaviours.<\/p>\n Each of these suspicious patterns is graded yellow, orange, or red, in escalating severity, for potential police investigation.<\/p>\n They catalogued over 1,000 suspicious football matches, with the three most common countries featured being India, Australia, and Vietnam.<\/p>\n Analysts sound a note of warning with data like this \u2014 countries with better monitoring systems will naturally find more suspicious matches. Australia, for example, which has a specialist national sports integrity unit, is particularly highly-rated, meaning that though they find a high number of cases, other countries with weaker systems may be more corrupt.<\/p>\n Australia, nevertheless, is still of particular interest to fixers. This may be due to its time zone, with games often being the highest profile matches during East Asia\u2019s evening primetime, often considered the hub of the global sport gambling industry.<\/p>\n Other nations, where monitoring levels may not be as high, are also treated cautiously by betting companies. Here, they will set extremely low limits on any stakes. One industry insider told The Athletic that these included Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, Myanmar, Tunisia, Bhutan, Uganda, and Kenya.<\/p>\n It means that countries which have the illusion of integrity, such as Australia or western Europe, are far more valuable to fixers, with bookmakers allowing punters to place higher stakes \u2014 and access far larger profits.<\/p>\n \u201cThe level of fixing is steady, if not increasing,\u201d says Lucy Miles, head of the financial crime team at Europol. \u201cIt comes back to the challenges of accessibility and the availability of modern technology. We see that a lot of the manipulation of match-fixing takes place in a particular country, but the organisers behind it are in another.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve estimated that 65 percent of the world\u2019s betting is done in the Asian market. There\u2019s a lot of unregulated betting there, and they\u2019re probably one of the engines in the European market.\u201d<\/p>\n It speaks to the interconnectedness of the global fixing economy \u2014 in which illegal betting on the other side of the world generates funds to organise manipulation, through a proxy team of fixers, in another country entirely.<\/p>\n Asia and Europe are the most common continents for fixes, with 384 and 352 suspicious games each according to the Marcolin Group, followed by South America, with 110. Another, more recent trend, is a change in the most popular months for fixing \u2014 whereas it previously used to be in May and June, at the end of the football season, experts are now wondering why the final three months of the year are predominant.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is basically every sport in every continent,\u201d says Rasmussen. \u201cOf course, the sports where you see the highest turnover are the most popular, the biggest targets, because of the size of the market.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there is any sport where we haven\u2019t had a public scandal yet, it\u2019s because we don\u2019t have the tools to detect it.”<\/p>\n Another who has devoted his career to fighting match-fixing is Spanish researcher Francesco Baranca, a veteran of several national and international integrity bodies. Baranca is visibly passionate about what he does \u2014 frequently dissolving into fits of giggles as he describes a sporting landscape filled with ironies and black humour.<\/p>\n Over recent years, he has begun independently tracking and cataloguing suspicious matches alongside a small group of collaborators, and shared his data from the second half of 2025 with The Athletic.<\/p>\n \u201cNormally, in one weekend, I\u2019ll receive more than 100 alerts,\u201d he explains. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean all of them are fixed, some can be explained, but every weekend there are 20 to 30 serious attempts at fixing. Then sometimes we can also get tips from bookmakers \u2014 on yellow card markets, or similar \u2014 when they do a deeper analysis of the markets which are not predictable.\u201d<\/p>\n On his list of suspicious matches, which he reports to the relevant bodies off his own back, are a string of high-profile games \u2014 as well as niche markets where the ability to even lay a bet is surprising.<\/p>\n For example, Baranca detected significantly adverse betting patterns at six games at the Under-17 FIFA World Cup in Qatar last November.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2246355945-scaled.jpg\")
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\nHighly suspicious betting patterns around the matches of a current top tennis player
\nSuspicions of fixing across multiple matches at a recent FIFA international tournament
\nMatches involving amateur teams and children being subject to multi-million dollar bets on the unlicensed market
\nThat women\u2019s sport is increasingly becoming a target for fixers as more betting markets are offered<\/p>\n
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