With tennis’s Independent Review Panel expected to report on the match-fixing crisis before the end of the month, the body that runs most of the world’s professional tournaments has announced that it is reinforcing its safeguards against corruption.
The International Tennis Federation is responsible for organising all events below ATP and WTA level, which involve more than 50,000 matches played by a semi-professional workforce of up to 14,000 players.
Betting alerts on these low-level matches have caused serious concern for tennis’s administrators, and led to the commission of Adam Lewis QC to lead the IRP investigation more than two years ago.
The ITF moved to pre-empt some of the recommendations in the report by announcing a new partnership with Sportradar, the sports-data specialist who already supply live scores from those low-level tournaments to the ITF and to betting sites.
At the moment, the Tennis Integrity Unit does its best to monitor world markets via voluntary agreements with around 25 bookmakers.