Women's football faces integrity challenges amid betting surge

The massive growth in women’s football in recent years has elevated the game to new levels but at the same time, the integrity of the sport is being exploited by match-fixers, data companies, and betting operators on an unprecedented scale.

Research for Play the Game found 38 matches with alerts for suspicious betting around the world between January 2024 and the start of November. This is a massive rise which can be an indication of potential manipulation.

Table 1: Alerts for suspicious betting on women's Football Game in 2024

The research identified suspicious betting on matches from friendlies and reserve matches to U18 women’s games in Kazakhstan and continental competitions including UEFA’s Champions League.

Brazil, where betting is in the process of being legalised, was the location of the most suspicious games ahead of another South American country, Paraguay where there was a swathe of arrests for fixing in late October 2024 including three women players.

A recent report, Game Over, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has flagged up the “growing popularity of women’s sports, especially football, which is attracting the attention of organized criminal groups” and the operation in Paraguay was just the latest in a slew of recent arrests around the world.

In October 2023, two matches in Uganda - Rines vs Kawempe Muslim Ladies and Gafford Ladies vs She Maroons – were among seven games targeted by a South African fixing gang that subsequently led to a swathe of arrests in the African country in June 2024.

Fixtures in China’s women’s top flight were among those found to have been manipulated in a campaign by Chinese authorities in September 2024.  

The problems even include junior games. This summer, the head coach of Vietnamese Thai Nguyen U16 women's football team, Nguyen Van Nhat, was fined 200 US dollars and banned for a year for asking the coach of Ho Chi Minh City women's team to instruct his players to underperform in a game in the national championships on July 21, 2024.

Meanwhile, UEFA issued a life ban from all football activities to one man, Mihail Bejenari in April 2024 over attempts to manipulate a U21 women’s game in Moldova and banned one of the players for two years and three others for a year apiece.

Women’s betting boom

Match-fixing problems in women's football are not new but the number of games under suspicion has grown significantly.

Back in 2018, a joint report from Starlizard Integrity Services, Stats Perform and TXODDS identified suspicious betting patterns in six women's games whereas there were no alerts on women's games in 2017. Also in 2018, the Belgian football association confirmed that three Belgium U-16 girls had been approached by a man reportedly of Turkish origin and offered 50,000 US dollars each to fix a game. 

Since then, there has been an explosion in the volume of betting in women’s football. In Sweden, for example, the volume of bets on the first-tier Damallsvenskan has risen from around seven million Swedish krona (SEK) in 2019 to 27.7 million SEK in 2023 according to the Swedish Sports Confederation, the Riksidrottsförbundet.

This rise has been accompanied by a surge in the number of women’s matches available for betting around the world with swathes of low-level and amateur games on illegal betting websites. Illegal betting is defined in the Macolin Convention as any betting activity that is not allowed by law in the jurisdiction where the consumer is located. This is the case in many Asian countries.

The recent U17 Women’s World Cup was available on a number of illegal betting websites, as was the U17 women’s championships in Asia and Europe.

230 women's club games available for betting over one weekend

To illustrate the scale of the problem, Play the Game carried out a data scraping exercise over the weekend of 10-11 November 2024 on the website of one of the most notorious illegal operators, 1xBet.

1xBet is a Russian-controlled, Cyprus-based illegal betting company with sponsorship deals with major football clubs such as Barcelona and Paris Saint Germain even though it was expelled from the UK in 2019 for operating a PornHub casino, and in 2021 was declared bankrupt in Curacao, where the company has its main licence, for refusing to pay out to customers.

According to Play the Game’s research, 230 women’s club games were available for live, in-play betting in 49 countries around the world during these two days in November 2024.

Table 2: Women's football games on 1Xbet over

The research showed that it was possible to gamble on matches in Uganda despite the recent problems with match-fixing in that country - including matches involving Kawepe Muslim Ladies.

Female football players in Uganda are likely to receive little or no payment for playing, which makes them more vulnerable to offers from match-fixers. The research also found U19 women’s games in Mexico and multiple matches in countries where the players almost certainly play without significant payment such as Ethiopia and Jordan.

Games were also offered in Cyprus, where players get some payment but the number of clubs in the league has shrunk from 10 to six due to financial problems since the Covid-19 pandemic.

A match was offered in Slovakia over that weekend and the national football federation has confirmed to Play the Game was played solely by amateur players.

Matches from low tiers are also available for betting

The research also found matches as low as the fourth and fifth tiers in some countries such as England and Spain including matches available for live betting on 1xBet in England’s National League South West and North, which is the fourth tier.

In the lower reaches of the English women’s game, wages vary widely. In the third tier, payment ranges from £30 a game at some clubs to full-time salaries of around £40,000 at others. A handful of clubs in the fourth tier tied to men’s clubs pay well, but many others only pay expenses.

Players paid poorly are easier to exploit by fixers, and therefore international player's union FIFPRO warns that making these games available on betting markets is a threat to the integrity of the sport.

“It’s ridiculous that certain games are being offered, and it’s the same in the women’s game,” says Roy Vermeer, FIFPRO’s legal director. 

“If those are matches where the players are not being paid at a decent level, which is prevalent in the women’s game, you will have problems.”

Betting during the game

Play the Game’s research on women’s football covered in-play betting, which involves events within the game. It is widely agreed that a significant proportion of betting-related manipulation is carried out during matches and is being driven by the sports data industry.

Most sports broadcasts are delayed, and this provides opportunities for bettors to beat the bookies by betting before the live odds are updated after an event such as a goal or booking.

To avoid being cheated, betting operators generally only offer in-play on matches where live data is collected in-person directly from the game by a scout employed by a data company.

Many women’s clubs are trying to develop from grassroots operations and have little idea about whether their games are being exploited and offered up for live betting, as data scouts can just walk up and pay for entry at matches like everybody else to avoid detection.

Maggie Murphy, the former chief executive of Lewes FC, which was relegated to the third tier of the English women’s pyramid this spring, says: 

“The only level of rigour that is applied to clubs outside the top two divisions is applied by the clubs themselves. There is very little oversight from the FA. Women’s football in general is an afterthought. Every element has to professionalise quickly but without knowledge. Everyone is in the dark.”

National football associations often know that data scouts attend low level games, but frequently do not pass this on to clubs.

The reason for not warning clubs can be found in the two-pronged business models of data companies. On the one hand, data companies act as integrity partners for many football associations and therefore should warn them about data scouts. On the other hand, the same companies also sell on data to both legal and illegal betting operators. 

This massive conflict of interest was exposed in an investigation by the Norwegian website Josimar in  2022, and whilst many data companies deny selling data to illegal operators, the presence of their scouts at lower-level matches is often not passed on to clubs by the companies themselves or national football associations relying on their help for integrity work.

This is how data from sports such as lower-level women’s games gets onto the illegal betting market, which do not report suspicious betting patterns.

Exclusive deals

The collection of data for betting has become more commercialised as sports realise the value of the information that is collected and sold from their matches. This has led to an increase in exclusive rights agreements.

Under the terms of these deals, only licence holders can send scouts to matches to collect the high latency data that betting operators need to accurately set odds. These companies seek to protect their exclusivity.

For example, data company IMG has an exclusive contract covering 44 competitions in 19 European countries, including women’s matches, and is taking rival Stats Perform to court for allegedly sending unofficial scouts to games in five countries, including women’s games in Germany.

Data companies provide information on large numbers of matches at all levels as part of their supply deals with betting companies. Data has often been collected from lower-level games to ‘bulk up’ these supply deals but the rise in exclusive deals makes data companies look for even more games that are not tied into contracts. 

With more and more women’s games being livestreamed, often for free in efforts to increase the fan base, these matches are increasingly attractive for betting operators - provided that the essential live data from the grounds is available. 

As one veteran of the sports betting data industry points out: “There are not many deals covering data in lower-level women’s football. It’s ripe for exploitation.”

Suspicious betting patterns in other types of women's sports

And football is not the only women’s sport affected. Play the Game’s research found evidence of suspicious betting in 38 fixtures in a slew of other sports, particularly basketball and volleyball, in eastern Europe.

Table 3: Alerts for suspicious betting on other women's sports in 2024

Many of the same issues that enable fixing exist in these other sports but are rarely mentioned by the integrity arms of sports data companies. Perhaps, because they are being overruled by their own commercial departments who do not want their data scouts to be kicked out of games as has happened at men's games in Germany when clubs became aware of how data was used. If that is the case, it augurs badly for the integrity of the women’s game.

Additional reporting by Jack Kerr.