Sportradar Claim Illegal Betting Poses High Risk

Betting data company Sportradar has claimed that illegal betting syndicates in Australia pose a high risk to the country’s sports. The claims come despite a government led clamp down after high profile match fixing cases rocked Victoria football earlier this year.

There are claims that Australian gambling laws need to be tightened after the match fixing cases, with Asian betting syndicates the focus of much of the ire. It was Sportradar who initially flagged the possibility of match fixing, through their monitoring reports.

6 men have so far been charged after investigations were made into Melbourne based football club Southern Stars. Sportradar Chief Executive Carsten Koel believes that these investigations very rarely lead to convictions however.

“It needs international coordination,” he said. “It needs a framework, it needs laws which are synchronised on the international level to tackle this efficiently.”

Managing Director Andreas Krannich was even more scathing, saying: “It’s an emerging market, in a negative way. They see that most sports are very vulnerable, they are clueless about how to handle it, they are clueless about sportsbetting.”

With online sportsbooks in Australia extremely popular, any clamp down on sports betting is likely to be met with resistance, but that doesn’t stop the government looking into ways to clamp down on betting syndicates who try to influence the outcome of sports matches.

Mobile betting is also set to take off in Australia, helped by the entry of Ladbrokes into the market recently. With smartphone penetration high, and sports betting extremely popular, the Australian market looks like the perfect place to start a new service.

With a new government in town, however, and regulation changes part of their manifesto, this is a time of great change in the Australian market. Whether or not they will be able to rid themselves of these betting syndicates remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the sportsbook market will continue to go grow.