Lottery and sports betting integrity body, Global Lottery Monitoring System (GLMS), believes the most effective way to combat match-fixing is to ensure that players are educated on the subject matter and effective prevention measures are in place.
Taking part in a panel entitled ‘Assessing the Impact of the Tennis Review of Integrity’ on day two of Betting on Sports Europe – Digital, Giancarlo Sergi, General Secretary of GLMS, stated the best way to eradicate match-fixing in tennis is through enhanced cooperation between regulatory bodies and preventative methods such as education programmes.
Sergi explained: “I think there is never enough cooperation. More importantly, education and prevention are also very very important. We tend to sanction a lot and this is normal. We do work a lot with Europol and Interpol, but in my humble opinion, sanctioning is the end of the process.
“From a sports perspective, sanctioning also means failure at the end of the day. It’s a weakness and what we need to do is invest at the beginning of the process by educating the players. For me, the future of fighting against match-fixing is really education and prevention.”
Over the summer, the Tennis Integrity Unit established an education programme with over 1500 players and other covered persons to educate them on how to combat match-fixing.
Fellow panelist Jonathan Gray, CEO of TIU, added: “Prevention is better than curing.
“Tennis has invested significantly in the education programme both in terms of the online mandatory training that all cover persons now must complete in order to be part of a professional game, through to my education and training team who regularly visit large tournaments and brief players and other persons, as well as doing a lot of work online training.”
Gray also believes that some of the issues in preventing match-fixing lie ‘around the structure of the sport and how money flows in the sport and obviously those issues are somewhat delayed due to COVID at the moment but on the agenda’.
