Detecting match fixing

The Trondheim company Sportradar has uncovered a major scandal in European football. Their monitoring system Betradar oversees 29 000 European football matches a year for 300 customers. When the system detects matches where the odds change very suddenly, or the end result is very surprising, an alarm is triggered.

The analysis division in London is notified, and examiners then check to see whether there were incidents in the match or other conditions that suggest match fixing. In this specific case, the coverage led to investigations in several countries, with raids and arrests. The people arrested for the match fixing may have earned as much as 10 million euro by bribing players, managers, referees and officials to get the result they wanted. The techno­logy behind Betradar was developed when Peter Forness and Ivar Arnesen of Sportradar wrote their theses at NTNU.