--- title: "A New Type of Gambling Scandal Is Sweeping Through Sports" description: "Experts warn of the rise of spot-fixing, when athletes deliberately alter small events in a game to get a big payout." date: "2026-06-21" modified: "2026-06-21" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/new-gambling-scandal-sports" categories: - "Finance" - "Future Society" --- # A New Type of Gambling Scandal Is Sweeping Through Sports ![A photograph of a soccer ball hitting the net of a goal.]() *Shutterstock / Futurism* 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*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()