Betting payout Blues

(Originally published on the ABC news site, The Drum 26/05/11)

By Aaron Flanagan.

Sports bet companies are crying loud today about having to potentially pay out on ‘betting irregularities’ identified during recent football match punting.

“I think there’s definitely a leak of information coming out and people are profiteering from it,” Alan Eskander of Betstar said.

In severe bad timing for the announcement of the ‘irregularities,’ ex Labour party head kicker, Karl Bitar chose the same time to announce his new role at Crown Casino.

Bitar has gone from The Sting’s Henry Gondorrf to Doyle Lonnegan in one befuddling career swap.

But the online sports betting companies don’t really need the likes of Bitar to help work the numbers if 2010 profits are considered.

Betfair, corporate partners of the Australian Football League, had total operating revenues of AU$522 million in 2010 and Sportsbet, controlled by Irish betting company Paddy Power after their 51% stake buyout in February 2010 for AU$132.6 million, showed a 44% increase in profit for the year.

Despite this apparent rampant success, the mysteriously named ‘AFL integrity office’ instigated an investigation into what it describes as unusual plunges that inspired the profiteering concerns that Eskander talks about.

These plunges were on players who usually fill defensive roles attracting pre-match betting interest for first goal scorer fields and then running out as forwards in premeditated tactical switches.

The struggle for supremacy between punter and bookie is as old as storytelling itself. Punters, as typified in betting folklore by Gondorff in The Sting, are always looking at playing the angles. Surely this comes as no shock?

“If you tried to ban it, it would go underground, such as the illegal betting market in India, and that is the worst thing that can happen,” AFL operation manager Adrian Anderson said. “As soon as we lose track with what is happening with the betting, we lose the ability to properly investigate and control it”.

Karl Bitar’s old mate Federal Sport’s minister Mark Arbib weighed into the issue as well saying, “The ministers will be meeting in a few weeks to consider a national policy on match-fixing in sport. The government wants to ensure we have tough regulations in place to prevent match fixing, while also ensuring we don’t drive betting onto the black market”.

What’s all the fuss about then?

Rather than the onus being placed at the feet of the AFL and its wholehearted engagement with aggressively advertised online gambling agencies, the onus is being placed on clubs to tighten up pre-match protocols.

Like Eskander’s complaint of ‘profiteering,’ this sounds suspiciously like industry protectionism.

The AFL and sports betting companies are working in tandem to lobby the likes of Arbib to ensure clubs don’t leak information about game tactics. Carlton coach Brett Ratten said he would immediately sack any employee leaking information.

Arbib and Bitar specialise in horrendously cutthroat political sackings. Heaven help the game if Ratten’s sad threat is realised and a player is sacked for telling his mates he’ll be playing forward on Saturday.