The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has entered into a partnership with the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) strengthening its efforts to combat match-fixing across the sport.
Under the memorandum of understanding (MoU), the parties committed to jointly detect irregular betting patterns and suspicious activities in football. The partnership between the AFC and IBIA will run for a period of four years.
The IBIA will deploy its Monitoring and Alert Platform to share real-time data on suspicious betting activity with the AFC. This will strengthen the AFC’s abilities to investigate potential match manipulation.
Both parties also said that the partnership will support the AFC’s goal of creating a secure environment for the sport.
AFC committed to keeping football “clean”
Speaking about the deal, AFC general counsel and director of legal affairs, Andrew Mercer, says the organisation is committed to maintaining high ethical and sporting standards within football.
The AFC’s Vision and Mission has outlined our steadfast ambitions to uphold the highest ethical and sporting standards,” Mercer said. “We are committed towards preserving our key tenets of fair play and integrity.
“Leveraging on strong collaborations with the world’s leading organisations is imperative.”
The MoU further strengthens the confederation’s ability to ensure football in Asia remains clean for the benefit of fans, players and its stakeholders, Mercer said.
IBIA CEO Khalid Ali also welcomed the new partnership. He said cooperation is a “vital” part of any integrity monitoring and investigatory framework.
“The IBIA is happy to be able to strengthen its relationship with the AFC through this important information sharing collaboration,” Ali said. “For its part, the IBIA will seek to safeguard the AFC ecosystem by utilising the monitoring of its members’ global customer account activity, which covers over $300bn in sports betting per annum.”
The AFC joins a long list of sports organisations working with the IBIA on the monitoring of events, including football’s Fifa and Uefa, as well as the International Olympic Committee. The IBIA also partners with a large number of betting operators to tackle corruption in sport.
Football corruption remains a concern for IBIA
Football remains one of the main sports of concern in terms of corruption for the IBIA. In its latest Integrity Report for Q2, football drew the second-highest number of betting alerts (16) of all sports.
However, it was esports that took top spot with 48 alerts, compared to one alert in Q2 last year. The IBIA noted a single esports case related to suspicious betting activity on 68 esoccer matches played in Q1 and Q2.
A total of 90 alerts were noted in Q2. Other sports that drew alerts include table tennis with 12, nine alerts relating to tennis and two for badminton. In addition, handball, boxing and padel drew one alert each.
