UEFA welcomes the CAS decision on Skënderbeu

UEFA welcomes the Court of Arbitration for Sport's decision to dismiss the appeal lodged by KS Skënderbeu against the UEFA Appeals Body decision of 26 April 2018.

Consequently CAS confirmed the decision taken by the UEFA disciplinary bodies to exclude KS Skënderbeu from participating in UEFA club competitions for ten (10) years and to fine the club with EUR 1.000.000 due to its involvement in activities aimed at arranging the outcome of matches.

This is a further confirmation of the reliability of UEFA's betting fraud detection system (BFDS) in identifying abnormal betting patterns on matches played by clubs at European and domestic levels.

With this decision CAS upholds the efforts taken to protect both domestic and UEFA competitions from match-fixing. It also shows the confidence CAS has in the UEFA BFDS – developed in conjunction with Sportradar – which is an instrumental tool in helping guarantee the integrity of competitions. Betting monitoring reports such as those provided by Sportradar and other providers – such as in this specific case Starlizard – are confirmed as being appropriate tools in the fight against match-fixing.

The BFDS was established in 2009 in response to the growing threat of match manipulation in both UEFA and European domestic league competitions. Its role is to highlight irregular betting movements, both pre-match and in-game (live) in the core betting markets by monitoring all major European and Asian bookmakers.

The monitoring of the betting markets covers all UEFA competition matches (approximately 2,000 per season) and games in the top two divisions and cup competition of UEFA's member associations (approximately 30,000 matches per season). The monitoring uses sophisticated algorithms and mathematical models to compare calculated odds with actual bookmakers' odds to determine whether the odds in a specific minute or time period are irregular.