Brenda García, captain of Mexican women’s first league soccer team Mazatlán, was banned from the sport for six-years in February for match-fixing results by WhatsApp with three of her team players, including the goalkeeper.
In England, one of Brazil’s top midfielders, Paquetá, faces a lifetime ban for deliberately getting yellow cards playing for Astor Villa, and in one case just to give his brother some winning cash on his birthday.
Match-fixing is not new to Latin America, or to Brazil, the country with the most reported cases of suspected fraud on the pitch these days.
Equated to a cancer that needs to be extirpated, match-fixing has become a serious problem now that on-line sports betting has taken off in the region, experts say, to the point where it threatens a billion-dollar business that in Brazil has grown in a few years to represent one percent of GDP of the Brazilian economy, Latin America’s largest.
“Match-fixing is terrible for the sport but also for the betting business. It undermines the sector’s two vital pillars: credibility and unpredictability,” Tiago Barbosa, Head of Integrity in Latin America for Genius Sports, the sports data firm, told me.
“This is a bigger problem than doping. At least the player doping himself does so to win. In match-fixing he is selling himself to lose,” said Barbosa.
Vulnerable
Brazil and other Latin American countries are extremely vulnerable to match-fixing because the great majority of professional soccer players are badly paid; while even many of the big international stars who earn fortunes have poor families and friends in the slum areas they grew up in.
Speaking exclusively to iGaming Futuro, he continued: “No one has told them that fixing the game is no joke, and could end their careers. As for the top players, they think they are untouchable and nothing will happen to them.”
That is where sports data firms provide key information for analyzing sports results – companies such as Sportradar, which recently renewed its contract with the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), and Genius Sports, which works with the Argentine and Mexican football federations (AFA and LigaMX) and Brazil’s National Basketball Federation (NBB).
Global Threat
“Match-fixing remains a global threat and continued vigilence is essential,” Sportradar’s EVP of Integrity and Regulatory Services, Andreas Krannich, told iGF. “Criminal organisations operate across all continents and constantly look for vulnerabilities in the sports ecosystem to exploit.”
Krannich said the renewal of Sportradar’s integrity partnership with the CBF, which includes monitoring over 8,200 soccer matches a year across all national men’s and women’s competitions, is an important step in efforts to combat match-fixing in Brazil, where the company has noted significant progress since its collaboration began in 2018.
“Last year Brazil saw a 48 percent drop in suspicious soccer matches, with 53 fewer alerts compared to the previous year, according to our ‘Integrity in Action 2024 Global Analysis & Trends’,” attested Krannich.
The Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gambling (IBJR), which groups the top operators in the country’s sports betting, is concerned with match-fixing, and says its members effectively monitor betting patterns daily using artificial intelligence (AI) to preserve sports integrity.
Fraud
When suspected fraud is identified, operators report this information directly to organizations such as the leading International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA). If match-fixing suspicions are confirmed, the IBIA sends the information to the Brazilian authorities to act as needed.
Many observers and monitors believe that soccer authorities in Europe and Latin America have for too long turned a blind eye to the problem of match-fixing.
And in an era of explosive online sports betting growth, and amid this perception of impunity, this has allowed the cancer of match-fixing to spread.
Barbosa believes that leaving enforcement only up to authorities is not good enough.
Investigate
The private sector should step up to the plate and act, he affirms, noting that in Brazil, for instance, the police have too much work on their plate, from murders to drug trafficking, to investigate and chase match-fixing.
Barbosa argues that the CBF and the clubs, which are flush with sponsorship money from betting houses, should invest more in integrity programs to educate professional players on the dangers and temptations of fixing results.
Speaking to iGamingFuturo from SBC Summit Americas 2025 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he told me:
“I doubt any of their contracts with players even have a clause committing them to stay clear of involvement in match-fixing. That needs to be explicitly spelt out.”
Scandal
Even Brazil’s most popular football team, Flamengo, has been hit by a match-fixing scandal.
Its striker Bruno Henrique is under investigation for allegedly receiving yellow and red cards during a match against rival Santos in 2023. Henrique was yellow-carded after committing a hard foul on a Santos player. He then approached the referee shouting angrily until he got a red card and was sent off.
According to both Barbosa and Amarante one thing is urgently needed in Brazil: More severe punishment to set an example that will dissuade players from match-fixing – and to guarantee foreign investors that the nation’s booming betting business will not be tarnished.
“[Unless match-fixing is tackled], this could be catastrophic for the business,” Amarante asserted.
In recent years there have been match-fixing crises in Peru, Venezuela and Central American countries, and more recently in Mexico.
Crime
The Mexican Football Federation (FMF) says that it is now taking the issue much more seriously.
“We are drawing up exemplary sanctions that will practically ban any player involved,” a FMF spokesperson told iGF.
Soccer’s world body FIFA has a mandatory five-year ban for players fixing play. In Brazil the maximum is two years, but the sanction is rarely enforced by lenient authorities.
In a recent betting scandal in the Brazilian state of Goias investigating prosecutors charged 16 players in a match-fixing scheme that had spread through the top soccer leagues.
But nobody was criminally convicted despite match-fixing being established as a crime in Brazil since 2012.
A few of the players got banned for two years and some were banned for just 12 games.
“What a joke!” said Barbosa.
A mockery indeed of Brazil’s beautiful game.
