Match-Fixing Declines, Risks Persist

Global efforts to curb match-fixing delivered modest but meaningful progress in 2025, according to SportRadar’s annual report, Integrity in Action 2025: Global Analysis and Trends. After monitoring close to one million sporting events across 70 disciplines worldwide, the Swiss-based sports data and integrity firm flagged 1,116 fixtures as suspicious—representing a marginal 1 per cent decline compared with 2024. On average, one in every 326 matches worldwide raised integrity concerns, underscoring both the scale of surveillance now in place and the persistence of illicit influence in sport.

SportRadar attributes the slight improvement to sharper technological monitoring, closer cooperation with law-enforcement agencies, stricter regulatory enforcement, and sustained education programmes for athletes and officials. The firm, a long-standing integrity partner of CONMEBOL, UEFA and FIFA, reported that more than 99.5 per cent of global sporting events were covered by its monitoring systems in 2025. This breadth of oversight, it argues, reflects increasingly coordinated international action to protect sporting integrity—although uneven regional trends suggest that vulnerabilities remain.

Europe continued to account for the highest number of suspicious fixtures, yet the continent recorded a notable improvement year-on-year. The number of flagged matches in Europe fell from 451 in 2024 to 385 in 2025, a reduction of 66 cases. South America also registered encouraging progress, with 64 fewer suspicious fixtures than the previous year. By contrast, Asia, Africa, and North and Central America experienced increases of 36, 43 and 41 cases respectively. Africa’s rise was particularly stark, with a 92 per cent increase between 2024 and 2025, highlighting structural weaknesses in governance and enforcement capacity across parts of the continent.

Football remained the sport most exposed to manipulation, despite a welcome 15 per cent fall in suspicious fixtures year-on-year. In 2025, 618 football matches were flagged, compared with 730 in 2024, 881 in 2023 and 777 in 2022. While football’s share of all suspicious cases declined from 65 per cent in 2024 to 55 per cent in 2025, it still dwarfed other sports, with nearly three times as many cases as basketball.

Cricket presented a more troubling trend. The number of suspicious matches rose sharply to 59 in 2025—almost three times higher than in any recent year. Analysts link this surge to the rapid expansion of T20 competitions, which generate high betting volumes and, in some markets, weaker regulatory oversight. Asia emerged as the principal hotspot, accounting for 69 per cent of suspicious cricket matches across six countries, followed by North and Central America (17 per cent) and Europe (12 per cent). Notably, spot-fixing dominated cricket-related cases, representing 91 per cent of all suspicious incidents, rather than outright manipulation of match results.

Suspicious Matches by Sport (2025)

The report also updates its 2024 findings, noting that Brazil recorded the highest number of suspicious fixtures among individual countries that year, underlining how concentrated risks can become in specific betting markets and domestic leagues. Encouragingly, suspicious football matches declined by 28 per cent in Europe and 37 per cent in South America in 2025, suggesting that targeted interventions can yield results when governance structures are robust.

Andreas Krannich, Executive Vice-President of Integrity Services at SportRadar, warned that complacency would be misplaced. “Match-fixing remains a growing threat. To stay ahead of those seeking to corrupt sport, sustained investment in technology, intelligence, education and cross-border collaboration is essential,” he said. The data suggests that while global safeguards are strengthening, the fight against manipulation remains uneven—demanding persistent vigilance from federations, regulators and betting operators alike.