The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has taken another significant step in safeguarding football in Asia by signing a four-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA).
Under this partnership, the AFC and IBIA will work closely to monitor and detect irregular betting patterns and suspicious activities in football matches across Asia.
Through IBIA’s Monitoring and Alert Platform, real-time data on suspicious betting activity will be shared with the AFC, enhancing its ability to swiftly investigate potential instances of match manipulation.
The AFC General Counsel and Director of Legal Affairs, Andrew Mercer spoke highly of this partnership for the sport’s integrity.
“The AFC’s Vision and Mission has outlined our steadfast ambitions to uphold the highest ethical and sporting standards, and we are committed towards preserving our key tenets of fair play and integrity,” Mercer said in a statement.
“Leveraging on strong collaborations with the world’s leading organisations is imperative to our fight against match-fixing and this MoU with IBIA further strengthens our ability to ensure football in Asia remains clean for the benefit of our future generation of fans, players and all our valued stakeholders.”
CEO of IBIA, Khalid Ali, expressed a similar sentiment.
“Cooperation is a vital part of any effective integrity monitoring and investigatory framework and IBIA is delighted to be able to strengthen its relationship with the AFC through this important information sharing collaboration,” Ali said in a statement.
“For its part, IBIA will seek to safeguard the AFC ecosystem by utilising the monitoring of its members’ global customer account activity, which covers over $300bn in sports betting per annum.”
This follows closely on the heels of the Chinese FA’s decision to impose lifetime bans on 43 individuals, including 38 players and five club officials, after a two-year investigation into match-fixing.
It’s also become quite the issue across all sports in Asia, with football still the biggest culprit.
A recent study by Sportradar revealed that Asia experienced the largest increase in match-fixing incidents in 2023. The study, which monitored around 850,000 events and matches across 70 sports, identified 1,329 suspicious matches, with football accounting for the majority of these cases.
This MoU marks a major step forward in the right direction for the AFC in combatting the rising issue of match fixing in Asian football. The hope is to erase this in professional football all together.
