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 Allegations this week that tennis authorities failed to deal with
widespread match-fixing has rocked the game, following similar
allegations that have blighted cricket, football and other sports.
The ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets has helped transformed
bookmakers from operators of dingy, smoke-filled betting shops into
multi-billion dollar de facto tech firms, pouring resources into
developing apps and complex algorithms and marketing to younger and
broader demographics.
"We're no longer restricted by geography or the limited choices of
one betting company. And we have wall-to-wall sport every day of the
week from across the globe beamed into our lounge rooms, on our
smartphones," said Scott Ferguson, a wagering industry consultant.
"Technology is everything."
The greatest danger for mobile gambling to intersect with corruption
lies in the ease of fixing a one-on-one sport like tennis, darts or
snooker, according to experts and professional gamblers.
Mobile apps that allow in-game betting on individual points or games
allow athletes to stealthily manipulate the results and may strike
some of them as less unethical as throwing an entire match, said
Sally Gainsbury, a senior lecturer at Southern Cross University who
has written a book on the subject.
"A PERFECT COMBINATION"
Most major bookmakers operate from small offshore jurisdictions,
making accurate predictions of industry worth extremely difficult,
said Gainsbury.
"There's a large gray sort of offshore market ... in every country,
where it's actually just not possible for the government to regulate
these sites that are based in all these tiny remote jurisdictions,"
she told Reuters.
"So it's difficult to get a really accurate size of how much people
are betting because a lot of it is actually illegal."
Patrick Jay, a betting consultant and former head of trading at
Betfair, estimates the global sports betting market is likely worth
about $1 trillion a year, having doubled in size in the last five
years. He expects it to double again in the next five.
The Australian government, citing a 2015 United Nations conference
at which Jay was a speaker, put that figure as high as $3 trillion,
of which 90 percent was "illegal" or in contravention of laws
regulating gambling in which the bet was placed.
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That range of figures, which includes betting on sports from soccer,
cricket and tennis to much less widely followed sports like snooker,
darts and table tennis but excludes racing, illustrates the
difficulty in accurately valuing the overall market.
"It has grown because of mobile technology. It allows people to
place bets anywhere, anytime," Jay told Reuters. "People are also
dealing in credit, and therefore accounts are being run all over the
world. It has created a perfect combination."
Leading bookmakers including Betfair Group PLC <BETF.L>, Ladbrokes
PLC <LAD.L>, Paddy Power PLC <PLSA.I> and William Hill PLC <WMH.L>
did not respond to requests for comment. There have not been any
allegations of wrongdoing by the bookmakers in the World Tennis
scandal.
Worried about the boom in sports betting and incidents of match
fixing, countries like Australia and across the European Union are
in the process of reviewing laws that experts like Gainsbury say are
"hopelessly outdated".
In Australia, for example, 2001 laws regulating Internet sport
betting bar anyone from placing a bet on a sporting event online
once it has begun, despite allowing live betting over the phone or
at retail bookmakers.
William Hill, an official partner of the Australian Open, has a new
"Bet-in-Play" feature for its Australian customers that requires
access to a smartphone's microphone while the bet is placed to
comply with such laws.
"There's been a lot of stagnation where a lot of countries
originally said, 'Well this is illegal, we won't let them do this',
but of course with the internet you can't make things illegal and
stop people going online," Gainsbury said.
(Writing by Matt Siegel; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
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