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Before playing at this year’s World Cup, the Ivory Coast soccer player Elye Wahi was arrested on alleged fixing offences.
Wahi, who plays for the French side Nice, hasn’t been formally charged yet, but what he’s accused of doing is emblematic of a new wave of scandals sweeping across sports. As The Athletic reports, he didn’t make a conspicuous error or stop trying to score. Instead, all he did was receive a yellow card — deliberately, the Ligue de Football Professionnel, the governing body of France’s top soccer league Ligue 1, alleges.
It may not sound like a big deal. But that’s the point of “spot-fixing,” the practice of deliberately manipulating smaller, less consequential events in a game with the aim of monetizing the blips on sports betting apps or prediction markets. It’s far less dramatic than full-blown match-fixing, when a player may purposely throw a game. And it can be even more subtle than points shaving, when you deliberately try to win a game with a smaller margin than expected to throw off the bookies.
In Wahi’s case, he clumsily tackled a player on the opposing team and promptly received a yellow card. Because it was his fifth yellow card of the season, he was suspended for his team’s next match. Sources told The Athletic that the LFP received notifications of suspicious betting patterns during the game involving wagers on Wahi receiving a yellow card, which the LFP confirmed.
If what Wahi did was deliberate, it was a perfect example of spot-fixing. The yellow card didn’t have a sizable impact on the game, which ended 0-0. But it could’ve provided a massive payout to someone who put money on this very specific event happening.
These kinds of bets are perfect for our nerdy data-driven age of sports. As The Athletic notes in a separate piece on the rising phenomenon, part of the way that sports data companies earn money is by selling their data to bookmakers.
Anything an athlete does on the field can be tracked and turned into a statistic, and major betting sites have been happy to let gamblers go ham on the hundreds of micro-events that happen in every sports game. How many balls will a pitcher throw? How many touches will a striker have?
Catalyzing the trend has been the rise of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, which trade in providing the kind hyper-specific bets that are well suited for spot-fixing. They’re also not technically considered gambling sites — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — and are subject to less regulatory scrutiny than traditional bookmakers.
Spot-fixing is being observed in “basically every sport on every continent,” Danish sports integrity expert Chris Kronow Rasmussen told The Athletic. “Of course, the sports where you see the highest turnover are the most popular, the biggest targets, because of the size of the market.”
“If there is any sport where we haven’t had a public scandal yet,” he added, “it’s because we don’t have the tools to detect it.”
Sports like basketball and baseball are more vulnerable to point shaving and spot-fixing and already have a few high profile scandals, but the beautiful game is starting to see it, too. Last year, three players in Australia’s top flight were found guilty of deliberately getting yellow cards across multiple matches. In England’s Premier League, the richest and most-watched sports league in the world, a player was accused of four counts of spot-fixing by also deliberately receiving yellow cards, but were cleared of any wrongdoing after a two-year investigation. Clearly, spot-fixing has sports integrity bodies feeling jumpy.
More on gambling: Texas Tech Quarterback’s College Career Over After Getting Caught Betting on His Own Games
