On the one hand, a new intelligence group from the Spanish league is responsible for analyzing and trying to prevent betting schemes with match-fixing. On the other hand, the entity that organizes the two main football divisions of the country is sponsored by a betting website. To complete, in the current season, no less than 19 of the 20 teams of the Spanish elite are supported by sites of the sector.
With bets generally moving more and more money in Spain, sports are prominent in this market. And companies invest heavily in advertising. In 2017, for example, houses and betting sites allocated 222 million euros to marketing and sponsorship actions.
Much of that slice goes to football clubs. Of the 20 teams of the first division of the Spanish football league, 19 have some kind of financial deal with a total of six betting sites, according to El Confidencial survey.
The only club that currently has no contract with a company of the online gaming sector is Real Sociedad. And not for lack of proposal, but for fear about the relationship between betting and match-fixing. Even so, Real Sociedad had the sponsorship of a betting website in the last two seasons.
The second division is also in the action plan of the betting sites. Five of them are responsible for partnerships with six clubs in the access division.
According to the body that regulates this market in Spain, bets moved 5.5 billion euros last year. In the same period, a change caught the attention: if before 98% of the sports bets were those made before the matches started, in 2017 more than 60% already corresponded to bets made during the games, instigating the users to predict events throughout the confrontations.
Faced with all this scenario, the Spanish league has maintained for a few months a team made up of betting experts, engineers, intelligence analysts and former police officers. They research news and databases, investigate social networks and betting forums, and rely on software that identifies anomalies in sports betting odds.
All this effort is to avoid that results or simple events during games are manipulated in betting schemes. At the same time, websites and specialist houses have already become partners and invest millions of euros in the biggest football teams in the country.
Source: GMB / UOL
