Israeli football is booming. Manor Solomon is scoring at a great rate in the English league, Oscar Gloch was bought for 7 million euros, Maccabi Haifa recorded a mostly respectable European campaign, the young teams are recording achievements and businessmen who want to profit from football are buying teams from our Premier League. On the face of it, there is something to build on.
But when you go down a little, the situation seems to be less good. According to Declan Hill, a journalist and investigator with a record of publications on game bias, and his team at the University of New Haven, this phenomenon also exists in the minor league in Israel. With the help of their research algorithm and big data tools, they analyze the games and Israel is on target. “There are a lot of game sales in Israeli and Kenyan football,” Hill wrote recently and a few days later, on March 5, he added: “The usual message from the research on game biases. More suspicious games in Israel yesterday.” Hill published several books on the subject, collaborated with the Olympic Committee and the Dutch Association, won awards and revealed several cases. In a conversation with the Sports Channel, he shared some of the information his team has about Israeli football.
Hill claims that he does not have any information about games in the Premier League, but the situation is different in the National League and League A. “My students research the betting market with the help of an algorithm that checks results sites from around the world and the changes on the betting sites during the games themselves, such as inside information,” he says, “They found radical changes in the betting ratios on games in the second and third leagues in Israel in large European betting agencies. I asked them to find information about suspicious matches in Israeli football and they did it easily. They said it was ridiculously easy, like catching fish in an aquarium. There are 5 teams that we are particularly suspicious of at the moment.”
This week, the research team at the University of New Haven @UNewHaven flags yet another suspicious match for fixing & corruption.
Congo vs Uganda U20
And, of course, the Kenyan and Israeli football leagues where “there is a lot”. #matchfixing #sportscorruption pic.twitter.com/huXjMstFYs— Declan Hill (@declan_hill) February 24, 2023
The usual note from the UNH research anti-match-fixing team.
More suspicious matches in Israeli league yesterday.
And South Africa… lights up the board for fixing.
Sigh.
I asked if they wanted to take up shooting fish in a barrel, might be more difficult. #matchfixing— Declan Hill (@declan_hill) March 4, 2023
It is important to separate legal bets, such as the toto and the winner which are under the Sports Betting Regulation Council, from illegal bets (bets). Those bets offer an extremely high ratio on games, higher than regulated betting. In some cases the ratio changes during the games themselves, allowing bettors to react to the game and earn money. The suspicion is that the betting company changes the ratio during the game, and the suspicious matchmakers pay the players in advance when they know what will happen (for example conceding a goal in the 78th minute). Thus the suspected players profit, the betting companies profit, the betting nets profit and the sport loses.
These stories have been running for a while, and honestly, do not surprise the people who follow the second (and professional) division of Israeli football. These things permeate and may harm all of football, and we can only hope that the relevant bodies – from the Football Association to Weizmann-Yer – will do all they can to combat these phenomena.
MThe league manager It was stated in response: “We will take seriously any concrete information that is forwarded to us.”