Sport, gambling, and match-fixing

Gambling has emerged as a double-edged sword for contemporary sport: it serves as a key source of revenues, while simultaneously posing serious challenges. This chapter provides a critical understanding of the social forces, regulations, and discourses around today’s sports under the influence of gambling. The chapter starts with a brief historical overview of the fluctuating relationship between sports and gambling. It outlines how the financial-ethical trade-offs have governed the relationship between sports and gambling and continue to raise integrity and public health issues. Narrowing the focus to the issue of match-fixing, the chapter also reviews diverse approaches adopted: economic, investigative-journalistic, sociocultural, and institutional perspectives. Finally, it discusses how the ongoing policy discourses of sport integrity constitute potential debates surrounding the ethical codes of conduct in sport

Stakeholders around sports gambling governance: A comparison of the United Kingdom and South Korea

Sports betting legalisation across the globe has formulated regulatory regimes in many countries. These regimes tend to assume the form of a network, comprising various stakeholders, including governmental bodies, sport organisations, betting operators, media and data companies and law-enforcement agencies. This chapter presents stakeholder relations in two contrasting sports betting governance networks: (1) the UK’s free market system and (2) South Korea’s state-monopoly system. By comparing the respective networks’ composition and operations, this chapter shows how disparate regulative models create differing interests and debates among the stakeholders in relation to common policy issues such as illegal betting, advertising, problem gambling and match-fixing.</div

Coaching transitions across borders: the pursuit of individuals advancing coaching careers in the competitive global landscape of Olympic sports

Intensified international competition for sporting success has facilitated coaches’ cross-national migration, which constitutes a space for coaches’ career transitions and development. This paper examines elite coaches’ international migration as part of coaching career transitions within the context of the global sporting arms race. Using a qualitative case study design, data were generated from documents and semistructured interviews with six South Korean coaches who had moved to Western nations to coach national teams in two Olympic sports. The analysis reveals an underlying mechanism of the coaches’ international mobility: dual imbalances existing between the sending and receiving countries—one in the levels of sporting performance; and the other in the perceived levels of modernisation in coaching cultures and sports systems. The migration opportunities were created by the performance imbalance between the home nation and destinations amid the structural context of the global sporting arms race. However, equally important is the individuals’ strategic initiative to seize the opportunities for their career development and mitigate the perceived modernisation imbalance in coaching practices. By highlighting coaches’ agentic capacity to navigate their career pathways within the global context, this study contributes to the literature on both international coach migration and coaching transitions.</p

PE teacher selection and employment examination: a reinventive institution within teacher education and socialisation

The form of Physical Education (PE) teacher selection matters in that, as a system of rules (i.e. institution), it shapes the practices of Initial Teacher Education (ITE), including pre-service PE teachers’ daily preparation for teaching qualification and employment. This article examines the secondary PE teacher selection examination as one of the locations of teacher socialisation and identity (re)formulation. Focusing on South Korea’s National Secondary Teacher Selection and Employment Examination (STSEE), the paper addresses two main research questions: (a) how does the STSEE structure everyday practices of pre-service PE teachers who prepare for the exam for a year at least; and (b) what does this intensive year-long routine of commitment bring to the social and professional identities of the applicants? Drawing on a micro-sociological concept of ‘reinventive institutions’ (Scott, 2010, 2011), this study analyses qualitative data from a number of documents and in-depth interviews with 11 pre- and in-service PE teachers. Our analysis reveals two main findings. First, the STSEE features key attributes of reinventive institutions, including total commitment to exam preparation, deference to gurus and communities of comradeship, all of which operate on the basis of individuals’ aspirations to success in the STSEE. Second, distinguished from the stereotype of physical educators in previous generations (e.g. incompetent, violent and unprofessional), PE teachers who have passed the exam acquire reinvented identities as smart, passionate and professional PE teachers who can enjoy ‘permanent job security’ with their advanced social positionality. The paper concludes by discussing the significance of teacher employment examinations in studying PE teachers’ socialisation into the profession

Integrity governance: A new reform agenda for sport?

Globally, “integrity” has emerged as a critical concept for sport, with scholars, government agencies and NGOs proposing the establishment of “integrity systems”, comprising measures such as new policy units, ombudsmen and mediation services. The purpose of this study is to assess the coherence of this reform agenda, to determine its core features and gauge whether it constitutes a new governing paradigm and departure from “professionalisation”. Drawing on case material from Australia and New Zealand, we trace the sport integrity agenda and its adoption into each country's government policies and programmes. The emerging agenda focuses on diverse risks at the periphery of “old” professionalised management, while demanding a sector-wide response and universal adherence. Coordination and regulation are emphasised (at national, state/regional and local levels), supported by central government policy frameworks and grievance detection regimes. While the integrity agenda has distinctive elements of a reform movement, preliminary evidence suggests it may become integrated under the existing logics of performance, audits and risk management. It nevertheless signals substantive changes to the conduct of sport organisations at multiple levels of the system

Globalization, migration, citizenship, and sport celebrity: Locating Lydia Ko between and beyond New Zealand and South Korea

The contested terrain surrounding globalization, migration, citizenship, and national identity shape the context in which modern sport celebrity develops in Asia. Focusing on female golf phenomenon Lydia Ko, the analysis locates her celebrity and national identity between her place of birth–Korea–and her place of citizenship–New Zealand. Several intersecting factors influenced Ko’s celebrity and identity construction including changes in New Zealand immigration policy, changes in Korean state policy towards overseas nationals, negatively viewed attitudes and behaviours of previous foreign-born celebrities of Korean-descent, and Ko’s own public proclamations regarding her national identity

Too much at stake to uphold sport integrity? High-performance athletes’ involvement in match-fixing

Non-betting-related match-fixing constitutes an important integrity issue in contemporary sports. With varied forms ranging from passive tanking to the purposeful, coercive, calculated bribing of others to gain advantages, non-betting-related match-fixing can be a form of corruption that deters sport development. This paper examines high-performance athletes’ involvement in non-betting-related match-fixing in South Korea. Drawing from survey data (n=731), this paper describes and analyses the prevalence of match-fixing, its locales (i.e., levels of competition) and origins (i.e., who made the offer/approach). Results show that: (1) 74 athletes (10.12%) were approached to take part in match-fixing, while 33 of those athletes (4.51%) actually participated; and (2) the match-fixing offers were usually made ‘by coaches’, ‘at high school-level nationwide competitions’, ‘for the purpose of entering universities’. Finally, this paper concludes by suggesting that the excessive incentives (e.g., university admission) linked with elite sport development structures may account for the strong motive behind non-betting-related match-fixing, and its endangering of sport integrity.</p

Good use, non-use and misuse: safe sport reporting systems in context

Reporting systems constitute an essential part of today’s safe sport initiatives across the world. Informed by literature on reporting wrongdoings in organisational contexts and a political sociology approach to policy instrumentation, this article examines how abuse reporting systems are utilised in youth high-performance sport environments. Drawing from 51 interviews with both user and provider groups of South Korea’s reporting facilities, the results offer three main uses of the country’s safe sport reporting mechanisms: (1) ‘good use’ that relies on their communicative capacity to signal changing organisational culture; (2) ‘non-use’ that derives not only from the fear of reprisals, but from more subtle relational and situational concerns, such as teams’ dissolution; and (3) ‘misuse’ of the systems as a tool to advance individual agendas as opposed to protecting victims. The findings of this study not only provide evidence for both positive and perverse effects of safe sport reporting facilities per se, but also illuminate the importance of social and institutional conditions that can both enable and constrain this newly implemented policy measure for athlete safeguarding.</p

Good use, non-use and misuse: safe sport reporting systems in context

Reporting systems constitute an essential part of today’s safe sport initiatives across the world. Informed by literature on reporting wrongdoings in organisational contexts and a political sociology approach to policy instrumentation, this article examines how abuse reporting systems are utilised in youth high-performance sport environments. Drawing from 51 interviews with both user and provider groups of South Korea’s reporting facilities, the results offer three main uses of the country’s safe sport reporting mechanisms: (1) ‘good use’ that relies on their communicative capacity to signal changing organisational culture; (2) ‘non-use’ that derives not only from the fear of reprisals, but from more subtle relational and situational concerns, such as teams’ dissolution; and (3) ‘misuse’ of the systems as a tool to advance individual agendas as opposed to protecting victims. The findings of this study not only provide evidence for both positive and perverse effects of safe sport reporting facilities per se, but also illuminate the importance of social and institutional conditions that can both enable and constrain this newly implemented policy measure for athlete safeguarding.</p

Odds-wise view: Whose ideas prevail in the global integrity campaigns against match-fixing?

The global expansion of sports betting has resulted in the formation of (inter)national governing regimes aimed at sustaining revenue and regulating attendant issues, including match-fixing. This article explores the workings of these regimes vis-à-vis the management of match-fixing issues in sport. More particularly, this article focuses on betting monitoring programmes as countermeasures against match-fixing and conceptualises these as social instruments that ultimately define issues and influence the wider integrity agenda of anti-match-fixing campaigns. Analysing documentary, observation and interview data from two disparate monitoring programmes, the results show that betting monitoring is a technical extension of corporate risk management, invariably reflecting the business interests of the betting industry. Therefore, the operating logic of betting monitoring defines match-fixing as an act of sabotaging the competitive edge of betting companies. Moreover, this interest-laden paradigm reigns within the broader policy agenda of sport integrity by equating the betting industry's interest with that of sport. From this, the article suggests that betting monitoring plays a part in the legitimation of commercial gambling by reframing the issue of match-fixing as a common enemy that gambling and sport join forces to combat, not a risk that gambling brings to sport