Tennis-Fixing in a Post-Covid World
Eye off the ball and you probably missed it: in early May, the ITF’s Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) banned Egyptian player Youssef Hossam, 21, from professional tennis for match-fixing, permanently excluding him for life. It was a rare rebuke in a polite, conciliatory sport.
The TIU hardly issues life bans. Hossam, who had slid to №810 in the ATP singles rankings after reaching a career high of №291 in December 2017, had received an initial suspension. But the charges proved too great: eight cases of match fixing, six of facilitating gambling and two of soliciting other players not to use best efforts, among others. In 2018 Youssef’s brother, Karim Hossam, 26, received his own life ban after being found guilty of 16 corruption charges that included providing inside information and facilitating betting.
“As a result of his conviction, Mr. Hossam is now permanently excluded from competing in or attending any sanctioned tennis event organized or recognized by the governing bodies of the sport,” the TIU said in a statement.
So why the harsh sentence? And are the Hossam brothers just bad balls in the bucket? Or are they just part of an increasing trend in pro tennis, as players outside the top-250 — especially those from developing countries, such as Egypt (as classified by the World Bank) — fight for tournament money, rare sponsorships, visas and the opportunity to play.
“One of the most important roles of the new Board is to work across the sport to reduce the opportunities for match fixing to occur,” said Jennie Price, CBE, the Independent Chair of the TIU.
Tennis: A betting chimera
Tennis is the third-most wagered-upon sport on Betfair, the world’s largest online betting exchange, with football (soccer) and horse racing staunchly set in first and second places. But for gamers, the possibility of tennis has grown endless: ad-court aces, second-serve return points won, forced errors, unforced errors. In addition to the infinity of bets, tennis is played everywhere, at all hours of the day, increasing the volume of betting on tennis exponentially in the past 10 years.
For lower ranked players, gambling makes it hard to resist the temptation to earn some survival money by hitting a few too many errors and moving on to a better tourney. In 2019, the TIU took disciplinary action against 26 individuals, including for six cases of match-fixing, according to its 2019 Annual Review. Only one, Joao Souza of Brazil, who was banned for life in January, had cracked the top 100 (№69). Five women were charged or investigated, including Helen Ploskina, 22, of Ukraine (№698) who also received a lifetime ban and a $20,000 fine. But the majority of players were men and almost all came from countries classified as middle-income.
“The 2019 total… is the still lowest since public reporting began in 2015 and is almost 48 percent lower than the total for 2018,” said Nigel Willerton, the TIU Director, in a statement. “I believe a combination of factors is behind this welcome downturn, including the deterrent effect of regular player sanctions by the TIU, the arrests and detention of players by law enforcement agencies in Europe and the results of our continued close working relationships… in the betting sector.”
“There can be no room for complacency, particularly as the many other forms of intelligence… show frequent instances of attempted and actual corrupt activity, predominantly at the lower levels of the sport.”
Between January and 22 March 2020 the TIU received a total of 38 tips of match-fixing through its contacts with the regulated betting industry, compared to 21 for the same period in 2019.
“The increase of reported matches in the first quarter of 2020 is an indication that the entry levels of professional tennis were deliberately targeted by corruptors, as the sport moved towards suspension due to the Coronavirus pandemic,” according to TIU spokesperson Mark Harrison.
The prize-money and lifestyle difference between players at the top of the ladder and the lower sector was brought into stark view when Covid-19 crisis shut down pro tennis the day before the BNP Paribas Open, which carries a total purse of $9.7 million. The same week in 2019, the Tennis Club Lillois Lille Metropole (TCLLM) in Lille, France hosted an indoor hard court ATP Challenger Tour event with a little more than $70,000 in prize money to split among 48 players on a sliding scale, from champion to first-round wins. Although a couple of thousand looks good for a week of tennis, professional players plug all of the money into travel, food and a place to lay their heads at night, not to mention new strings. If a player doesn’t travel alone, coaches, trainers, hitting partners and family stand to benefit from — and in some cases, add pressure for — a “low-impact” injury and a withdrawal for better horizons, according to reports from various investigations into betting.
From ITF Berth to Ban
At the 2016 Australian Open Junior Championships, Youssef Hossam was №19 in the ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors, boasting a big forehand and a showy one-handed backhand. He advanced to the third round in Melbourne before losing to Australian Alex de Minaur, now ranked №26 on the ATP tour. Three months later, Hossam became the first Egyptian in the Open Era to break the top 10 in juniors — a feat that he believed he could replicate in the pros.
“If not top 10… then I’d like to be a top-50 player and play Grand Slams, make it far in the slams. I believe I can go there, I don’t see it as mission impossible,” Hossam told Sport360, an Abu Dhabi-based website, in 2016. When he won five ITF titles in 2017 and cruised into the top 300, Egypt seemed poised to land its first top-100 player since 1978.
Hossam had started playing tennis at age six with his older brother, Karim, at the Six October Club — named after a satellite town of Cairo and the war that returned the Sinai desert to Egypt. During the 2011 revolution, when the Hossams’ father couldn’t safely take the brothers to practice, Youssef was “literally hitting balls against the wall” for months, he said.
But Hossam signaled early on that to make the leap to the top-100, where Egyptian Ismail El Shafei last stood in 1970s, he needed support. “Not just financial, although that is important because traveling to tournaments is very expensive,” he said. “I would need support from the federation, from sponsors.”
Hossam also proved prescient about the problems his brother Karim, faced. “When he finished playing juniors, he was excited to start playing ITF Futures and did really well at the start but he… didn’t get out of it.
“My father, since I was a young boy… he would call me an African champion all the time. He taught me and my brother to think big, have greater ambitions. Instead of dreaming of becoming a national champion, or even an African champion, I dreamt of bigger things. So that gave me a lot of motivation for sure, to try and achieve something no other Arab has managed to achieve.”
For his part Karim Hossam, in TIU documentation, said that he was first approached to throw his first-round match against Richard Gasquet during the 2017 Qatar ExxonMobil Open. He said he told the player “no”. But later that year, when the same player offered the elder Hossam $1,000 to throw one of the regular ITF Futures tournaments in Sharm el-Sheikh, which he had won many times over, he decided to accept the offer. Karim told inspectors, “I thought he was lying to me because I didn’t think certain things really happened.” But he also saw the money as a way to advance his training. “I wanted to play big tournaments, train in the USA, but I needed money,” he said. Karim Hossam started recruiting other younger players and used match-fixing as his pyramid-scheme to earn the money to go to bigger tournaments, such as the BNP Paribas Open, often called the “Fourth Slam”.
Many Egyptian players are now worried about the reputation of the sport in their country. “Not everyone is the same. Egypt is a country of over 100 million people with so many people playing tennis, and not everyone will make these mistakes,” Sandra Samir, Egypt’s №2-ranked player, told the Abu-Dhabi-based The National.
Samir, who grew up playing alongside the Hossams, feels “sad” for both brothers, but acknowledges that their mistakes can prove to be an important lesson for others. “These lifetime bans are a cautionary tale for all players, but it’s also a wake-up call for the federation, that if you don’t start supporting your players more, your reputation will be ruined,” Samir said.
