Sports Integrity: Betting And Corruption – Annual Review 2022/23

Welcome to the Sports Integrity section of the LawInSport Annual Review 2022/23. As in previous years, the aim of this Chapter is to identify and review some of the notable cases and events in 2022 and to discuss what trends might be drawn from them and what lies ahead.

This year, Louis Weston has been assisted with both the research, writing (and comedy) by Sam Cuthbert.

So as memories of the empty stadiums caused by COVID 19 have faded, the sporting calendar has found its feet once more. Like night follows day, with more professional sport has come more corruption, match manipulation and the detection and prosecution of cases left hovering by inability to travel and interview. All that backed up not just by our review but by the publications of amongst others Sportradar who found the year ending 2021 to have had the largest number ever of suspicious matches (over 900) across 76 countries but with more than 50% of which were in football and the bulk of which in Europe1.

This article divides organically into three parts:

• First a discussion of high-level corruption in sport and whether 2022 was the start of accountability for that corruption.

• Second, the match manipulation/betting allegations which have dominated sporting headlines.

• Third, the anti-doping cases, both human and equine.