WBSC enters into agreement with Sportradar to help safeguard the integrity of the game
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-softballworld governing body with its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS) for eachWBSC international competition for the duration of the agreement.
The UFDS is an advanced and proven betmonitoring system that has been independently assessed and verified byrecognized experts in the field of sports betting and integrity. Bettingpatterns are analysed for abnormalities by a global team of qualified integrityexperts, and any suspicious games are subsequently reported to partners,allowing critical visibility into worldwide match-fixing. Sportradar IntegrityServices have detected over 6,900 suspicious games across different sports duringthe 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 ofathletes, officials and staff about the latest trends and topics surroundinginternational sport, the WBSC Integrity Unit recently organised, incollaboration with the IOC Olympic Movement Unit on the Prevention of theManipulation of Competition, a two-part series of webinars about competitionmanipulation.