Bookmakers are not to blame for recent scandals in sports

There has been a lot of press recently about scandals in sport whether it be faking injury in Rugby, diving in Football or even deliberately crashing an F1 car but who are the real losers when this happens? We think it is the innocent punter. We have in the past been confronted with betting syndicates who work through unlicensed bookmakers to place huge bets having first influenced the outcome with bribes but this is usually focussed on lower levels of sport where the bribe is meaningful to the participants but how can you bribe a footballer earning over £100,000 per week? There are huge amounts of money in sport these days and it is therefore no wonder that some will stop at nothing to achieve success but recent events have nothing to do with betting and all to do with the sports bodies themselves. Unfortunately a delegation from various sports bodies as recently as this week were trying to convince Gerry Sutcliffe, the UK Sports Minister, that bookmakers should pay to fight corruption in sport. There is already a body funded by bookmakers known as “ESSA” (European Sports Security Association) that monitors suspicious betting patterns and informs the various sports regulators but they cannot take any direct action; that is up to the regulators themselves but with the sports bodies eager to promote their own sports there could be a conflict of interest in handing down stiff penalties. Just to take the F1 case as an example; someone deliberately crashes a car at high speed endangering the lives of drivers, marshals and spectators and gets a suspended sentence or in other words as long as they don’t do it again in the next two years, no penalty at all. Why? Because the sport needs Renault. It is not the betting industry at fault here, it is the players, coaches, managers and owners and the only way out of it is stiffer penalties.