26 Octber 2015.
There is corruption in every kind of sport. Sport is no longer about passion, winning, losing, pain and pleasure. It is now all about money. One of the key area which leads sport to corruption is the unregulated internet gambling. Internet gambling is said run up to $1.5-2 trillion a year. With this level of revenue prospects, gambling houses think that they can make even more money by fixing the matches. With hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal they can afford to throw enough money to have an outcome of a game in their favour.
Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, blames South Asian and East European crime syndicates for this level of corruption in the sports field. Inaction by the governments of their own countries is helping these syndicates to thrive well.
The U.S. has in place the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which prohibits online gambling in any form, with an exception made for fantasy sports. A key clause in the Act states that fantasy sports contests must be based on multiple real-world events and that “no aspect of scoring or how a team wins is based solely on 1 performance or 1 athlete/player in any 1 event.”
Fantasy sport is also known as rotisserie or roto. It is a game where imaginary or virtual teams of real players of a professional sport are assembled into teams to play the game. The teams compete on the basis of the statistical performance of those players’ players in actual games.
It is believed that by increasing the popularity of fantasy sport some of the money flowing into internet gambling can be diverted to fantasy sport gambling. This, it is hoped, would leave the real sport less vulnerable to corruption. It is not going to be easy to popularize fantasy sport gambling as it lacks the thrill of a real game.
There is a lot of effort put on educating the players with workshops and e-learning modules. The corruption persists not because the players do not understand the significance of corruption but because they are tempted and become greedy now and then.
In another frontier, the development in technology has made it possible to monitor the 65,000 soccer matches played all over the world and detect possible fraudulent outcome.
While all efforts are being made to keep sport clean, the easy money that gambling houses make will continue to dominate the way the games are played.
