The British Football Association has charged Richard Bredice for wagering misconduct, and his offences encompass 456 bets that were placed over the course of nearly a decade. Bredice served as Manchester City’s Team Performance Analyst from 2013 to 2019, after which he went on to work for Burnley FC.
The FA has mandated that Bredice will be banned for 12 months in total, six of which have been suspended until the end of the 2025-26 season. Bredice has also been required to pay a financial penalty of £4,500.
Bredice Made £2,350 by Wagering on Football
According to the FA, Bredice wagered a staggering £11,285 in total. The profits he managed to secure from gambling amounted to £2,350, with most of the money being won from the 67 bets related to his own clubs. Some of the bets in question were against Manchester City winning.
The most serious instances of misconduct were dubbed “Alleged Inside Information Bets” by the FA. This concerned bets totalling £2,214 that were tied to the transfers of Manchester City players, and he won almost all of them with just one exception, which yielded him £1,739 in profits. Both the significant amount of money put at stake and the high success rate led to the FA’s suspicions that Bredice had placed the bets while knowing information not available to the public at the time.
It should be noted that Bredice denied the said allegations, i.e. he insisted that the bets were not placed with knowledge of which players would be transferred. According to his defence, the bigger stakes were a mere reflection of the lower odds as opposed to an indicator of inside information.
Bredice is Facing Consequences for Wagering with Inside Information
The Independent Regulatory Commission tasked with overseeing the case considered a range of factors before reaching a decision on how to punish Bredice. According to the FA, the alleged inside information bets had a 92% success rate, which was in stark contrast to the 29% success rate of the rest of his bets, as he had won only 129 of the 444 remaining bets. The FA also had concerns that Bredice had not placed any bets on transfers not tied to Manchester City.
The Commission thoroughly examined one particular bet of £515, seeing as it had been deemed as particularly suspicious. Bredice alleged that he had no memory of placing this wager due to having been under the influence of alcohol after a Manchester City staff party. However, the Commission concluded that due to the stake’s size and him placing the bet on the morning following the party, Bredice had known of the player transfer. Other instances of problematic bets include three wagers regarding the transfers of a single player, and a lone bet the size of £750.
The aforementioned factors, as well as other circumstances surrounding the case, led the Commission to conclude that some of the bets in question had indeed been placed with inside information. The Commission specifically pointed to how, for a number of years, Bredice worked in the same building as the player staff, and a focus was also placed on Bernice’s own initial admission that the £750 bet “had to” have been done with him knowing the outcome.
- Author
Daniel Williams
