PULLY, Switzerland — The World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) has entered into a two-year partnership with Sportradar Integrity Services, a global supplier of sport integrity solutions and partner to over 100 sports federations and leagues.
Sportradar will provide the baseball-softball world governing body with its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) for each WBSC international competition for the duration of the agreement.
The UFDS is an advanced and proven bet monitoring system that has been independently assessed and verified by recognized experts in the field of sports betting and integrity. Betting patterns are analysed for abnormalities by a global team of qualified integrity experts, and any suspicious games are subsequently reported to partners, allowing critical visibility into worldwide match-fixing. Sportradar Integrity Services have detected over 6,900 suspicious games across different sports during the past 17 years with 900 of these taking place in 2021 alone.
“We’re looking forward to benefiting from Sportradar’s expertise in providing bet monitoring and intelligence solutions for appropriate detection and investigation of threats to sport integrity, maintaining baseball and softball’s game unpredictability and safeguarding the international game from manipulation,” said WBSC President Riccardo Fraccari. “Following the IOC’s and specifically the OM Unit PMC’s (Olympic Movement Unit on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competition) leadership in the prevention of competition manipulation, we are working towards enhancing the protection of clean baseball and softball athletes with this new agreement.”
As part of its continued upskilling of athletes, officials and staff about the latest trends and topics surrounding international sport, the WBSC Integrity Unit recently organised, in collaboration with the IOC Olympic Movement Unit on the Prevention of the Manipulation of Competition, a two-part series of webinars about competition manipulation.