The Royal Thai Police and the Football Association of Thailand used information from Sportradar to arrest 12 people, who are now under investigation for match-fixing. Here Andreas Krannich, the firm's managing director, integrity services via email, discusses certain aspects of his company and the case via email.
What is your company's role in helping curb match-fixing?
Sportradar was launched back in 2001 and since then has established a reputation as the world's No.1 provider of sports betting solutions and services to licenced betting operators around the world. This unique position inspired our CEO Carsten Koerl to launch our "integrity services" over a decade ago and these integrity services, which include our award-winning "fraud detection system", are now widely understood to be a credible monitoring system that has played a critical role in over 220 successful sporting sanctions and 25 criminal convictions across the globe.
How your company works with the FAT?
We previously worked with the Thai Premier League in 2014 and the Sports Authority of Thailand in 2015 and maintain regular communication with officials of both the FA Thailand and the Thai League. Our work on the Thai football case was a result of the AFC [Asian Football Confederation] formally connecting us to the Thai authorities. We have a comprehensive partnership with the AFC, which includes betting-monitoring and intelligence gathering from leagues and cup competitions in every Asian country and the key regional tournaments across the continent.
What information you gave the Thai FA that led to the arrests?
We cannot provide any specific information about the situation in Thailand, but nowadays, working closely with sporting authorities and law enforcement agencies, we tend to begin processes by delivering Sportradar reports to our federation or league clients. These reports will often marry the most comprehensive analysis of betting patterns from over 550 operators around the world, with cutting-edge intelligence findings pulled from a full spectrum of open source analysis. We find that our partner recipients then either launch their own investigations and disciplinary procedures or work with police to support parallel criminal investigations and court cases. It is our trustful relationships and our credible information that have led to our findings playing such a key role in successful sanctioning in a range of countries.
What is your company's "achievement" in helping suppress match-fixing in Southeast Asia in particular and other parts of the world in general?
We have worked with the AFC as well as a range of individual sports federations, leagues and tournaments across the region for a number of years now. We were involved in key match-fixing investigations that focused on Australia, Laos and Nepal in recent years and we also focus heavily on delivering preventative solutions in the region, whether with education workshops in places such as Malaysia and Vietnam or by working on the recently launched AFC Integrity App to support whistle-blowers. Globally, we work with over 70 sporting bodies across 17 sports to deliver the most comprehensive and impactful range of integrity solutions: they cover monitoring and detection, intelligence and investigations, prevention and education as well as a further range of consultancy services. The cases we have been involved in, which have led to a club being banned from the Uefa Champions League as well as a Fifa World Cup qualifier being replayed, speak for themselves, and we remain committed to working hand in hand with any sporting or state authority that shows a real and full commitment to safeguarding sport and its integrity.