BBC Article on Football Stats Betting

This weekend, the BBC published a news article about the use of third-party data agencies to settle bets on football statistics.

As the article accurately reported, disputes about the number of shots on target, tackles and saves are increasingly common. These bets are heavily marketed by bookmakers and they seem to be very popular with punters.

Matter of Fact vs Matter of Opinion

At IBAS, we have made no secret of our frustration at this type of betting. There are so many matters of fact on which bets can be placed and settled with confidence.

The majority of these football statistical betting markets rely on matters of opinion. From our experience, that makes avoidable disputes inevitable.

It is not our role to tell bookmakers what markets they can offer. Nor is it our role to advise people what they should and should not bet on. IBAS’s role is to see that bets are settled fairly.

As we have said in the BBC article, our opinion is that it is fair for a bookmaker to name an independent provider of data to explain to customers how their bets will be settled. It is fair, in principle, to use that data to settle bets.

It is important for punters to understand that placing a bet on “Harry Kane total shots on target” is actually a bet on how many shots a named data agency decides Harry Kane will have on target. Punters are betting on the opinion of the data agency.

Our Input to the Article

We said the following to the BBC:

1) Our job is to decide whether bookmakers have acted fairly in the way they settle bets. It is not our job to decide whether we agree with the decisions of the data agencies. Similarly, we do not offer an opinion on whether football referees, boxing judges or horse racing stewards have made the ‘right’ decision.

2) We are concerned that there is an imbalance in the fairness of access to the data agencies. Specifically, we believe that if bookmakers are able to directly query the decisions of an agency about how events are classified, a mechanism needs to be made available for punters to query those decisions too, recognising the practical challenge of the scale of queries it might generate.

3) Given the popularity of betting on this type of data, we believe that greater efforts should be made to standardise any data that is published. To have different agencies publishing different statistics for the same match is confusing and even more likely to cause disputes. It seems to us that some professional sports/leagues/competitions have managed to control statistical data and ensure that all outlets publish identical data, so it may at least be possible for others to do the same.

Focus on Transparency

We consider it imperative for everyone to understand what they are betting on when they place a bet. For a number of years, we have encouraged those bookmakers who participate in the IBAS ADR scheme to make it clear where they offer statistical betting markets, which data provider they will use to settle bets.

We have reported these concerns to the Gambling Commission through the mechanism of annual statistical reports we are required to supply to the regulator and publish on our website.