The authorities of three Chilean teams activated football alarms. Club Deportivo Palestino, Club Deportes Iquique and O'Higgins FC published a letter denouncing an unknown link between the National Professional Football Association (ANFP) and a private company linked to online betting.
The clubs accused the ANFP of having paid contracts with Genius Sports, an international company based in England that manages sports data for betting houses.
Deportes Iquique detailed a situation that occurred during one of their matches in their minor series: they discovered that the match was being broadcast on the platform of an online betting house. Upon investigation, Iquique learned that during the incident there was a person from Genius Sports who transmitted all the information through his cell phone.
Both Palestino and O'Higgins later discovered that there were also people from the same company attending their training teams' matches. After an investigation, they managed to determine that there are contracts with the ANFP that allow that company's personnel to enter the stadiums.
"This company pays ANFP to have access to the competition data and provide detailed information on each event that occurred in the matches, for use by the betting houses, which we consider unpresentable," the complainant teams stated in the letter. In the letter, the teams spoke directly to Pablo Milad, president of the organization, and denounced that these links promote fixing and fraud in matches: "You and all of us who have a relationship with football know how dangerous the relationship with football is. sports betting system. Especially in the case of youth football that takes place in an environment that is more difficult to control, with players with less capacity to resist pressures and offers, with parents with easy access to people with an interest in fixing results and even with technical bodies with little experience”.
Although there is still no legal framework that regulates this situation in Chile, the clubs assured that the FIFA (International Association of Football Federation) regulations do. Citing an article from the international entity's Code of Ethics, they stated that "all types of interest with entities, companies, organizations that promote, negotiate or direct bets related to football matches" are prohibited.
