MOSCOW, September 14 (RIA Novosti) -Over 300 football matches around the world are suspected of match-fixing with especially high numbers in England, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday.
"Our fraud detection system has classified more than 1,500 football matches as suspicious since 2005. We have also detected a lot of other manipulated matches in various other sports," the intelligence-gathering firm, SportRadar, told the newspaper.
The Daily Mail reports the discovery only a week after its report on a "secret watch list" of footballers allegedly involved in fixing matches. The news also comes after the former chief executive of the European professional Football Leagues, Emanuel Medeiros expressed his suspicions of a football club run by criminal gangs fixing matches.
"I have evidence but I cannot say which club or which country," said Medeiros on Wednesday while speaking at the Soccerex conference in Manchester.
The president of Sporting Lisbon, Bruno de Carvalho mirrored Medeiros' fears and blamed the rise of third-party ownership (TPO) over footballers in Europe for the increased risk of match-fixing. Carvalho claimed TPO was "a monster that is living in almost all the clubs" and explained that many TPO funds also owned gambling companies.
SportRadar's security team monitors betting patterns from bookmakers as well as pivotal incidents in games and movements of players and associates. The firm's investigations over the past six months have led to 60 arrests and 19 charges of match-fixing crimes.
