LONDON — Professional tennis's anti-corruption unit, accused of failing to pursue allegations of match-fixing by leading past and current players, insists that it has both the ability and the determination to nail miscreants big and small.
Yet its list of catches is very modest for a global sport that one study says is the third most vulnerable to betting fraud through match-fixing, because of the proliferation of low-level tournaments and the difficulty of proving that any player has lost deliberately.
The London-based Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) was set up in 2008 by all the sport's four governing bodies - the men's ATP, women's WTA, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the Grand Slam Board - to address concerns that the betting frauds besetting cricket and soccer were also targeting tennis.