Abstract
The world we live in has changed immeasurably during the last quarter of a century. The role computers have played as a catalyst for this change in modern society cannot be overstated. Soon after the advent of the Internet came social media, which was followed by the dawn of the so-called era of big data, and all of this has happened in less than half a century since Bill Gates and his friends were toying with transistors and capacitors in creating what would eventually become Microsoft and Apple. The era of big data has meant that in recent times, the status of statisticians, analysts and “quants” has been elevated to such heights that interrogating data is now a core activity of mega-corporations like Google and Facebook. Financial markets have long used analysts to help gain an edge over competitors and better build portfolios which balance returns and risk, and so it is no surprise that another type of financial market, the global market on sports betting, is also employing statistics to gain an edge.
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Notes
- 1.
For those interested, Einmahl and Magnus suggest that 9.28 seconds is the ultimate time achievable for the 100 m.
- 2.
Even when the purpose of a fix is not to make money on the betting market (and hence no money is pumped onto the market), the flow of knowledge about the fix to the market is difficult to avoid. In 2006, the Calciopoli scandal in Italian football saw clubs attempting to fix the results of matches for non-betting reasons—to win the league, for example, yet betting market “learnt” of the fixes because those who knew what was going on thought it was an opportunity to make some extra money by betting on the matches.
- 3.
Boshnakov et al. (2017) use an alternative discrete distribution for modelling football scores, but the deviation from Poisson is relatively small.
- 4.
In football, goals occurring in the extra minutes added to the end of the first and second halves of play are recorded as occurring in the 45th and 90th minutes, respectively.
- 5.
The size of bet possible to place on the market is somewhat staggering. Traders suggest it would be possible to place bets of around $300,000 on matches in the Belgium Second Division without arousing suspicion.
- 6.
In practice, the biggest fixes in terms of size of fraud take place in Asian markets which have the liquidity to support large bets. Fixes detected in Europe are typically less sophisticated and smaller scale in money terms and picked up by algorithms looking at volume, especially spatially concentrated volume.
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McHale, I.G. (2018). The Use of Forensic Statistics to Identify Corruption in Sport. In: Breuer, M., Forrest, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on the Economics of Manipulation in Sport. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77389-6_10
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