Match fixing
In organized sports, match fixing is the act of playing or officiating a contest with the intention of achieving a predetermined result, violating the rules of the game and often the law. There are many reasons why match fixing might take place, including receiving bribes from bookmakers or sports bettors, and blackmail. Competitors may also intentionally perform poorly to gain a future advantage, such as a better draft pick or to face an easier opponent in a later round of competition. A player might also play poorly to rig a handicap system.
Match fixing, when motivated by gambling, requires contacts between gamblers, players, team officials, and/or referees. These contacts and transfers can sometimes be discovered, and lead to prosecution by the law or the sports league. In contrast, losing for future advantage is internal to the team and very difficult to prove. Often, substitutions are made by a coach, designed to deliberately increase the team's chances of losing, rather than ordering the players who are actually on the field to intentionally underperform, are cited as the main factor in cases where this has been alleged.
Match fixing includes point shaving and spot-fixing, which center on smaller events within a match that can be wagered upon but are unlikely to prove decisive in determining the game's final result. According to Sportradar, a company that monitors the integrity of sports events on behalf of sports federations, as many as one percent of the matches they monitor show suspicious betting patterns that may be indicative of match fixing.
In sports where a handicap or ranking system exists and is capable of being abused, throwing the game is known as "sandbagging". Hustling, where a player disguises his abilities until he can play for large amounts of money, is a common practice in many cue sports, such as nine-ball pool.
Motivations and causes
Some major motivations behind match fixing are gambling and team advantages. According to investigative journalist Declan Hill it has also been linked to corruption, violence and tax avoidance. In Eastern Europe, organized crime is linked to illegal gambling and score fixing. In Russia, people have disappeared or been murdered after acting against bribery in sports.Agreements with gamblers
There may be financial gain through agreements with gamblers. The Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which several members of the MLB's Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to fix that year's World Series for monetary gain.One of the best-known examples of gambling-related race fixing is the 1933 Tripoli Grand Prix, in which the winning number of the lottery was determined by the number of the race-winning car. One ticket holder held the number belonging to Achille Varzi, contacted him and agreed to share the winning should he win. Varzi contacted other drivers who agreed to share the money if they deliberately lost. Despite a poor start, Varzi won the race after his opponents deliberately underperformed throughout the race.
A large match-fixing ring in the lower levels of professional tennis, centered around gambling, was broken up in 2023. At least 181 players were involved. A similar organized effort in Chinese and NCAA basketball was uncovered in 2026.
Competitive advantage
Match fixing can also occur when teams or athletes manipulate the outcome of a match to gain a strategic or competitive advantage rather than direct financial benefit. In such cases, the aim may be to influence standings, improve seeding, or create conditions that benefit a particular competitor.In sports such as Formula One, where each team fields two drivers, teams have at times used one driver to create a strategic advantage for the other. While team orders themselves are not inherently match fixing, controversies such as Crashgate demonstrate how the pursuit of competitive advantage can motivate deliberate manipulation of a sporting event.
In this case, Renault driver Nelson Piquet Jr. was instructed to crash deliberately, exploiting the safety car rule to benefit his teammate Fernando Alonso, enabling him to win the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.
Better playoff chances
Many sports have tournaments where the result of one round determines their opponent in the next round. As a result, by losing a match, a team can face an easier opponent in the next round, making them more likely to win.The National Basketball Association is the only one of the four major professional sports leagues of the United States and Canada in which home advantage in the playoffs is based strictly on regular-season records without regard to seeding. The top six teams earn an automatic playoff berth, while the seventh through tenth teams compete for the last two seeds in a "play-in tournament".
In the Canadian Football League, since the introduction of the cross-over rule, Western teams have been occasionally accused of losing near the end of the season in situations where a loss would cause them to finish fourth place in their division and where such a finish was still good enough to secure a berth in the league's East Division playoffs. In recent years, the East has often been viewed to be a weaker division than the West; however, if any Western team has attempted such a strategy, it has not paid significant dividends for them since teams who qualify for the playoffs via crossover have gone a combined 5-7 in the East Division Semi-Finals, and 0-5 in the East Division Finals. As of the 2022 season, no Western team has advanced to the Grey Cup championship game from the Eastern bracket.
A more recent example of possible match fixing occurred in the ice hockey competition at the 2006 Winter Olympics. In Pool B, Sweden was to face Slovakia in the last pool match for both teams. Sweden coach Bengt-Åke Gustafsson publicly contemplated losing against Slovakia, knowing that if his team won, their quarterfinal opponent would either be Canada, the 2002 gold medalists, or the Czech Republic, 1998 gold medalists. Gustafsson would tell Swedish television "One is cholera, the other the plague." Sweden lost the match 3–0; the most obvious sign of match fixing was when Sweden had a five-on-three powerplay with five NHL stars – Peter Forsberg, Mats Sundin, Daniel Alfredsson, Nicklas Lidström, and Fredrik Modin – on the ice, and failed to put a shot on goal. If he was seeking to tank, Gustafsson got his wish; Sweden would face a much less formidable quarterfinal opponent in Switzerland. Canada would lose to Russia in a quarterfinal in the opposite bracket, while Sweden went on to win the gold medal, defeating the Czechs in the semifinals.
The 1998 Tiger Cup – an international football tournament contested by countries in Southeast Asia – saw an example of two teams trying to lose a match. The tournament was hosted by Vietnam, with the eight countries competing split into two groups of four. The top two in each group advanced to the semi-finals with the winners playing the runners-up of the other group. In the first group, Singapore finished on top with Vietnam finishing second; this meant that the winners of the second group would have to travel to Hanoi to play the host nation in the national stadium on their national day, while the runners-up would face Singapore in Ho Chi Minh City where the final group match was taking place. As the two teams involved – Thailand and Indonesia – had both already qualified for the semi-finals, it was in both teams' interest to lose the match and finish in second place. As the game progressed, neither side seemed particularly concerned with scoring, while the defending was lackadaisical. As the match entered stoppage time, Indonesian defender Mursyid Effendi scored an own goal, overcoming the efforts of several Thai players and the goalkeeper to stop him. Both teams were fined $40,000, and Effendi was banned from international football for life.
In the final month of the 2010 Major League Baseball season, the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays were in a tight race for the American League East division title and by the final week, both teams had already clinched at least the wild card. The Yankees went 3–7 over the final 10 games, losing their regular-season finale, while the Rays went 5–5 and won theirs, giving the Rays the AL East title by one game and the Yankees the AL wild-card berth. Winning the division would have given New York an ALDS matchup against the Texas Rangers, who at the time had star pitcher Cliff Lee; the Yankees instead defeated the Minnesota Twins, a team they historically have had more postseason success against. Allegations of the Yankees purposefully settling for the wild card, presumably to avoid facing Texas in the ALDS, began to surface after the Yankees defeated the Twins. Additional allegations came up in 2012 when Yankees general manager Brian Cashman commented in response to a possible playoff expansion that his team had "conceded the division" and that winning it meant "nothing more than a T-shirt and a hat". However, Cashman insisted that the Yankees were not motivated by any desire to lose games, but were merely ensuring their best players were well-rested for the postseason, which he contended was perfectly ethical behavior. In 2012, Major League Baseball added a second wild card in each league, with the two wild cards playing a single-elimination game in order to give more importance to winning the division. In 2022, the postseason was further expanded, adding a third wild card and making the round a best-of-three series.
The 2012 Summer Olympics saw two examples of match fixing of this type:
- Members of four badminton teams from China, Indonesia and South Korea were ejected from the women's doubles tournament for intentionally losing matches to allow better pairings in the knockout stages of the competition. In what the BBC called a "night of shame", players made simple errors throughout the match, despite booing and jeering from the crowd, and warnings from the match umpire and tournament referee to cease and desist. The Badminton World Federation found the four pairs guilty of "not using one's best efforts to win a match" and "conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport."
- In the women's football tournament, Japan intentionally played a draw with South Africa in Cardiff, allowing it to finish second in its group so it would not have to travel to Glasgow, more than 300 miles away, for the first round of the knockout stage. Instead, Japan remained in Cardiff and defeated Brazil in their quarterfinal en route to the gold medal match.
As previously mentioned, the practice of coaches on a playoff-bound team deliberately benching a team's best players for some or all of the final match of the regular season is often defended as a common sense measure to avoid unnecessarily risking injuries and fatigue to the team's star players.
Some argue that a coach should not only have the right to select a starting lineup for a match that gives the team the best chances of winning titles in the long should this be a different lineup than the one that gives the team the best chances of winning the game at but that doing so is the smartest course of action.
For example, during Euro 2004 the Czech Republic rested nearly all of its starters from the first two group matches for the final group match against Germany. Since the Czechs had already clinched first place in the group, this move was seen to have the potential to allow Germany a better chance to get the win they needed to advance at the expense of the winner of the Netherlands–Latvia game. As it happened, the Czechs' decision to field a "weaker" side did not matter since the Czechs won the match anyway to eliminate the Germans.