Brasilia Welcomes Sports Integrity Summit
Brazil will host its second annual Sports Integrity Summit, in the federal capital, Brasilia, on May 11, 2023. Those in attendance can look forward to a variety of panels and networking opportunities, centered around the topics of Brazilian sports at home and abroad, and sports betting. The overall goal of the summit is to address problems associated with sports integrity which have been a long-standing issue when betting is involved.
Various entities will discuss paths towards better sports integrity in Brazil at an upcoming summit. Presenter Genius Sports uses technology to flag suspicious betting behavior.
©Ilya Pavlov/Unsplash
The Summit resumes after Covid-19 pause
The Brazil Sports Integrity Summit is hosted by both the International Institute of Governance and Risk (known as GovRisk) and data company, Genius Sports. These two organizations are particularly well-suited to the task of handling the sports integrity topic, given their investment in upholding existing regulations as well as Genius Sports’ background in sports data and tech.
A first summit was held before the Covid-19 pandemic, in October 2019. This edition centered around a meeting between Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, the Public Ministry, the Federal Police, and the Special Secretariat for Sports. Various representatives from the group also met in Brasilia to discuss the issue of fairness and regulation in sports and agreed on launching a Sports Integrity Partnership to further their common goals.
This partnership has just recently manifested in the form of an organization, “Associação Brasileira de Defesa da Integridade do Esporte” (“ABRADIE” or “the Association”). According to Genius Sports, this group is actually a non-profit, and is focused on the promotion of integrity in Brazilian sports.
This means that the Association exists not as an official government body, but that it will work closely with the government as well as with industry to address common sports integrity issues. These issues include possible fraud, match-fixing and doping, for example.
CEO of GovRisk, Dominic Le Moignan, shared why he feels the summit is happening at exactly the right time, in a recent press release.
“This summit is both timely and enormously important, following both an increase in match fixing attempts in some Brazilian football leagues and other top sports, alongside ongoing efforts to regulate sports betting in Brazil. The summit is a unique opportunity for Brazil to draw lessons from the successes and mistakes of other earlier regulated markets and to design an ecosystem that both supports sports teams and players against criminal activity and protects the integrity of Brazilian sport now and for future generations.”
Why this problem affects Brazil
Companies like Genius Sports use technology to track betting information in an attempt to identify suspicious betting behavior. Their software can help identify and flag suspicious bets out of the copious amounts of transactions that occur every day, all over the world. A similar system helped officials in Spain identify a case of match-fixing recently.
In the case of Brazil, this technology has already proven useful. The country has suffered more and more from match-fixing in recent years and in soccer alone, the sport has triggered a record-breaking amount of integrity “alerts.”
There is of course hope that the regulation of sports betting in Brazil will go some way towards combating these issues, too, as it will give the government and police more power to stop illegal betting and fight fraud. However, the issue is already at hand and must be addressed now, with or without regulation.
Towards this point, a variety of expert representatives from abroad will also join the summit to offer their advice and experience. Attendees can also look forward to demonstrations from Genius Sports about how their technology works, to get a better overview of what can be done to fight this particular form of crime.
