Integrity is a systems problem, not a policy problem

The policy I had already signed

When I was approached in 2012, I had already sat through integrity briefings. I had signed the codes of conduct. I knew, in the way that everyone knows, that fixing a match was wrong and that it carried consequences.

I was earning £850 a week at Bromley. The first offer was £60,000. The person making it was not a stranger in a car park. He was someone I had come to trust, and the conversation began with friendship long before it arrived at money. That season I took part in close to a dozen fixed matches. In 2015 I was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

I raise this not for sympathy but because it is the clearest evidence I have that policy, on its own, does not work. Every policy that should have protected me and my sport existed. None of it was present in the room when the decision was made.

Where policy stops

A policy is a document. It describes what should happen. A system is a set of connected functions that notice what is actually happening, respond to it and learn from it. Sport has spent two decades writing better documents and comparatively little time building systems.

The evidence of the gap is in the numbers. Sportradar monitored more than one million events across 70 sports in 2025 and flagged 1,116 as suspicious, 618 of them in football. Every one of those fixtures is the end of a chain that began months earlier: a relationship, a debt, a contract running out, a message on a phone. The flag arrives at the last link. Nothing upstream was connected to it.

Inside most governing bodies the functions that could have caught the earlier links sit in separate places. Education belongs to one department and happens once a year. Reporting is a hotline nobody trusts. Monitoring is a feed from a supplier. Legal is called when it is already too late. Communications finds out from a journalist. Each function may be competent. The seams between them are where the fixers work.

Seven capabilities, one system

At GAMECHANGER360 we describe a complete integrity function through seven capabilities. None of them is new. What is new is treating them as a single connected system rather than as seven separate purchases.

Knowledge. A living body of case material, methods and threat patterns that every other capability draws on. Fixers adapt. Knowledge has to move at the same speed.

Education. Delivered by people who have lived the approach, in the language athletes use, at the career moments when risk is highest, and repeated rather than annual.

Technology. The platforms through which education, reporting and monitoring actually reach people, built so that what happens in one flows into the others.

Intelligence. The analytical layer that joins a report from a player to a pattern in a market to a change in a squad's circumstances, and turns that into a risk picture someone can act on.

Legal and governance. Rules that anticipate the current threat, including prediction markets and administrative decisions, with the audit trail to enforce them.

Media and communication. The capacity to explain an incident, a sanction or an alert clearly and quickly, so the institution controls the account rather than reacting to it.

Advisory and implementation. The work of fitting all of this to a specific federation, league or regulator, with its own structures, budgets and history.

What connected looks like in practice

A player uses a confidential channel to report an approach, without triggering the investigation he is afraid of. That report, anonymised, raises the risk score on a fixture. The monitoring layer watches that fixture more closely. The education programme quietly refreshes the relevant module for his squad. If a market moves, the legal team already has a record. If a journalist calls, communications has a prepared position and a timeline.

None of these steps is dramatic. Together they are the difference between an institution that finds out and an institution that already knew.

What this means for federations, leagues and regulators

The question to ask of any integrity programme is not whether each part exists but where the seams are: which function does not know what the next one knows, and how long it takes information to cross. A code of conduct cannot answer that. A system can.

This is the design principle behind the GAMECHANGER360 platform, in which 360 Academy, 360 Report, 360 Sentinel and 360 Intelligence are built to share one record from the start.

Sources

• Sportradar, integrity report 2025
• iGaming Business