Odds-wise view: Whose ideas prevail in the global integrity campaigns against match-fixing?

Abstract

The global expansion of sports betting has resulted in the formation of (inter)national governing regimes aimed at sustaining revenue and regulating attendant issues, including match-fixing. This article explores the workings of these regimes vis-à-vis the management of match-fixing issues in sport. More particularly, this article focuses on betting monitoring programmes as countermeasures against match-fixing and conceptualises these as social instruments that ultimately define issues and influence the wider integrity agenda of anti-match-fixing campaigns. Analysing documentary, observation and interview data from two disparate monitoring programmes, the results show that betting monitoring is a technical extension of corporate risk management, invariably reflecting the business interests of the betting industry. Therefore, the operating logic of betting monitoring defines match-fixing as an act of sabotaging the competitive edge of betting companies. Moreover, this interest-laden paradigm reigns within the broader policy agenda of sport integrity by equating the betting industry's interest with that of sport. From this, the article suggests that betting monitoring plays a part in the legitimation of commercial gambling by reframing the issue of match-fixing as a common enemy that gambling and sport join forces to combat, not a risk that gambling brings to sport.

Integrity governance: A new reform agenda for sport?

“…Thus where the problems under integrity are behavioural risks to be prevented rather than political-administrative deficits to overcome, we can suggest that the integrity agenda has a substantially different institutional ‘logic’ (cf. Stenling, 2014; Tak et al, 2021).…”

“…This point notwithstanding, there are at least two identifiable differences between the ideational elements of professionalisation and the emerging integrity agenda. While the former was principally a remedy for day-to-day 'kitchen-table' administration, the integrity agenda is focused on future risk and incidents occurring at the periphery of managerial reach (Tak et al, 2021). Like match-fixing, the issues of bullying, harassment and intimidation have, until now, resided outside the contemporary purview of managerial functions (i.e., strategic planning, financial control, programme design, evaluation and budgeting).…”

Globalization or Glocalization? The Emerging Scholarship on Sport Match-Fixing in Light of Asian Context

“…Compared to the quantitative work on match-fixing, there are several examples that follow the qualitative tradition. To gain a better understanding of how countries deal with match-fixing in various sports, relevant studies have employed a qualitative, interpretive, multimethod approach encompassing the case-study approach [9,[20][21][22][23][24], contextualization [17,18,43], and sociohistorical analysis [27][28][29]. The above suggests that theoretical work on match-fixing in sports has become more abundant by drawing on various qualitative methodologies involving the analysis of official discourses, ethnography, interviews, and content analysis.…”

“…Given the nature of the core concern and the themes expected to be revealed, academics from sports management, sports sociology, economics, and criminology are among the most active in match-fixing studies [3]. Asian-related scholars have made important contributions through their theoretical analyses of match-fixing, and different theoretical approaches have been applied, such as criminological analysis [40,43], governance theory [24], the institutional approach [18][19][20]43], social capital theory [21,22], and social network theory [5,8,9,14,23,36]. Sports, as a social phenomenon, can be regarded as an entry point for a better understanding of sociology and the application of sociological knowledge.…”

Traces of (dis)organised crime in sports gambling: a case study of the 2011 K-League match-fixing scandal

“…Others have given more weight to social norms (such as a code of brotherhood) within particular cultural settings as a factor that makes individuals vulnerable and willing to become involved in match-fixing (Lee 2017;Tzeng and Lee 2021). Still others have characterised match-fixing as an inescapable by-product of the contemporary political economy that legitimises and promotes gambling on sport (Tak 2018;Tak et al 2018bTak et al , 2022.…”