Security exec admits tennis 'extremely vulnerable' to match-fixing

Sports corruption expert Massimiliano Montanari reacts to allegations of match-fixing at the French Open. Montanari: “We understand that there is an investigation in place for the Roland Garros match, an investigation which is now led by the office of the prosecutor in Paris. And of course, we are still talking about an allegation, and we are still talking about an investigation that is ongoing, so we still don’t have the final outcome. So as I said before, we obviously need to be very prudent with what we are saying. Tennis is certainly one of the most vulnerable sports from a match-fixing perspective. A business that the ICSS some years ago with Sorbonne University tried to measure and better understand, and we discovered that, at that time on an annual basis, up to 700 sport competitions were suspected of being fixed every year, and estimated that 80 per cent of bets, whose total amount was between 200 up to 500 billion euros annually is placed on illegal bets, making the whole sport extremely vulnerable to match-fixing.”