The governing body of Australian football is taking part of the money placed as wagers on games at all levels in the country under a secret agreement, reports have emerged. Sources familiar with the matter claim that the agreement involves not only international football clubs but also games played by local teenagers, and amateur suburban club competitions.
The secretive arrangement of Football Australia, however, is only part of multiple similar agreements inked between Australian sporting bodies such as the Australian Football League (AFL), the National Rugby League (NRL) and Cricket Australia, and major international sports betting operators.
According to some documents obtained by Four Corners, some sports governing bodies in the country are able to earn a commission of up to 17.5% of the profits generated by international bookmakers from Australian punters betting on their events. The payments, which are also called “product integrity fees”, total millions of Australian dollars annually and bring additional proceeds of gambling money to organisations that already benefit from gambling sponsorships and advertising.
Currently, the majority of local sporting codes only allow punters to place wagers on the two highest tiers of the competition, reports claim that Football Australia actually gets a cut of all the proceeds, no matter if it comes to local social teams or top-tier clubs. Under the secret agreement, Football Australia is entitled to get either 1% of every wager placed on a football game in the country or 15% of the profit generated by the bookmaker – whichever value is higher.
This basically means that even if the bookmaker takes a loss on a certain bet, the governing body of Australian football still gets paid.
Gambling Operators Use Data Scouts to Get Live Updates for Their Customers
For the time being, gambling companies in Australia often use data scouts in games at various levels, especially in lower tiers where matches are rarely streamed live. Such scouts send bookmakers live updates so their customers across the world are given the chance to bet on matches in real-time.
For example, Sportsradar, a Nasdaq-listed company, has a network of over 5,000 lookouts on a global scale, all of them collecting data from almost one million sports events annually. The company itself has confirmed that it is one of the several operators that collect data from Australian sporting competitions. Such data may be distributed to licensed bookmakers on a global scale to inform its integrity partners that focus on bet monitoring and detection of suspicious wagering patterns.
Reportedly, British gambling giant bet365 is one of Sportsradar’s largest customers.
Such data collection, however, has raised some concerns. The national match-fixing regulatory body has previously warned that offering gambling on lower-tier games boosts the risks of match-fixing in Australia. The director of sports betting and competition manipulation at Sport Integrity Australia, Jason Whybrow, noted that players could be approached to throw a match, and someone might be tempted to do so in return for some money.
Football Australia Says It Remains Focused on Eliminating Match-Fixing Risks
Football Australia issued a statement saying it allowed wagering on the lower-level sports competitions in the country as a strategy to keep better oversight and protect the game of football from potential threats to integrity through information sharing.
The governing body of Australian football further noted that it remains aware of the potential risks and has put a comprehensive integrity framework in place to help it keep those risks under control and manage them in the best way possible.
Currently, concerns regarding the relationship between sporting leagues and gambling operators in Australia are not limited to football.
As reported by Four Corners, there are agreements between the AFL, the NRL, and Cricket Australia and sports betting operators targeting Australian customers. For the time being, none of the three aforementioned codes has disclosed the value of the deals with international bookmakers in their financial statements. However, the National Rugby League revealed for Four Corners that it generated AU$50 million from agreements with gambling companies in 2022, while the Australian Football League has generated between AU$30 and AU$40 million.
- Author
Olivia Cole
