Match-fixing still happening in Hong Kong, says soccer chief as he calls for legalised betting
Hong Kong Football Association’s Mark Sutcliffe wants help from the government to stamp out the issue once and for all, or risk the game falling further
Sutcliffe told delegates at a Soccerex China forum in Zhuhai on Wednesday that match-fixing was still happening despite their best efforts to stamp it out, including hiring a fraud-monitoring consultant.
“We have a significant percentage of games being fixed at the moment,” said Sutcliffe, the chief executive of the Hong Kong Football Association. “Even though our players have signed a code of conduct and we have compulsory briefings at the start of every season where we explain what the risks are of match-fixing, how they are going to be approached, how to avoid it and what the consequences are.”
The HKFA in 2014 employed Sportradar, a Switzerland-based company that specialises in monitoring matches and the gambling industry globally to identify unusual betting patterns.
The company, claims Sutcliffe, earmarked a number of games where irregularities have been spotted.
“Sportradar monitor every game in our Premier League, our First Division and our reserve division and we get a weekly report on those games that have been fixed,” he said.