Global efforts to curb match-fixing across professional sport recorded modest but meaningful progress in 2025, according to Sportradar’s annual integrity review, Integrity in Action 2025: Global Analysis and Trends. The Swiss-based sports data and technology firm monitored more than one million competitive events across 70 sports worldwide and identified 1,116 fixtures as suspicious. This represents a marginal year-on-year reduction of around one per cent compared with 2024, suggesting that enhanced surveillance and enforcement measures are beginning to have an effect.
Sportradar attributed the improvement to a combination of sophisticated monitoring technology, firmer legal enforcement, and sustained education programmes within federations and leagues. The company, which partners with major governing bodies including UEFA, FIFA and CONMEBOL, reported that over 99.5 per cent of global sporting events were covered by integrity monitoring systems in 2025. Observers say this breadth of coverage reflects a growing international consensus that safeguarding sporting integrity requires coordinated, cross-border action.
Europe once again accounted for the largest share of suspicious fixtures, yet the continent also recorded a notable improvement. The number of flagged matches fell from 451 in 2024 to 385 in 2025, a reduction of 66 cases. South America likewise registered a strong decline of 64 cases year-on-year. By contrast, Asia, Africa, and North and Central America experienced moderate increases, underlining that progress remains uneven and that organised betting-related corruption continues to migrate towards jurisdictions with weaker regulatory capacity.
Football remained the sport most exposed to integrity risks, with 618 suspicious matches recorded in 2025, down 15 per cent from 730 the previous year. Although this reduction is significant, football still accounts for more than half of all suspicious cases identified globally, a figure that dwarfs the totals recorded in other sports. Basketball ranked second, followed by tennis, table tennis and cricket, illustrating that manipulation is not confined to a single discipline but has spread across the sporting landscape.
Cricket, in particular, saw a sharp rise in suspicious activity, with 59 matches flagged in 2025—almost three times the number recorded in 2024. Analysts link this increase to the rapid expansion of short-format competitions, especially T20 tournaments, which create frequent betting markets and heightened vulnerability to spot-fixing. In cricket, 91 per cent of suspicious cases related to spot-fixing rather than attempts to alter match results outright.
Suspicious Matches by Sport in 2025
| Sport | Suspicious Matches |
|---|---|
| Football | 618 |
| Basketball | 233 |
| Tennis | 78 |
| Table Tennis | 65 |
| Cricket | 59 |
Regionally, Asia accounted for the majority of cricket-related suspicious cases, with six countries responsible for 69 per cent of the total. North and Central America represented 17 per cent, marking the first time multiple cases were detected in that region, while Europe accounted for 12 per cent. Overall, the report estimates that, globally, one in every 326 matches played in 2025 was flagged as suspicious. Encouragingly, football’s share of total suspicious fixtures fell from 65 per cent in 2024 to 55 per cent in 2025, although Africa recorded a worrying 92 per cent increase in flagged football matches year-on-year.
Commenting on the findings, Andreas Krannich, Executive Vice-President of Integrity Services at Sportradar, warned that match-fixing remains an evolving threat. He stressed that staying ahead of criminal networks requires sustained investment in technology, intelligence-led investigations, education for athletes and officials, and deepened international cooperation.