Betting

Mystery surrounds 8XBet, Manchester City’s new Asian betting partner. Open-source intelligence points to the UAE.

Bet365’s foray into the Chinese market may have expanded to include more than 12,000 domain names during the pandemic. IP addresses registered in Australia but located offshore, some possibly in Hong Kong, have been a key part of its operation.

You’d have thought that with the imminent publication of the British government’s White Paper on gambling and the current public interest in – and criticism of – that business, English football clubs would have taken a step back in their toxic relationship with bookmakers. At least for a while.

A football player or official in England is being charged once every three weeks on average by the Football Association in one of the sporting world’s biggest probes for betting on matches.

Welcome to the crazy world of betting on English non-league football. All the way down to the tenth tier matches are on the global betting market. 

The triad gangster at the heart of English football gambling.

Close to a thousand semi-professional and youth football matches from Europe are available for live-betting on a typical weekend, an audit of the global betting industry has found.

Betting operator 1XBet, one of football’s biggest and most controversial sponsors, has been declared bankrupt for refusing to pay out to customers and faces losing its licence. At the same time the company is expanding its global operations

FC Barcelona’s global betting partner, the controversial Russian bookmaker 1XBet, is regularly offering in-play odds and livestreamed videos of “fake” sporting competitions – including one football league with a team that shares the Catalans’ name.

«Now, look, very often, these bank guarantees aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Like I saw one example where the bank guarantee came from that country’s central bank, but when the money came, it came from a hundred different accounts, and you think, what on earth is going on there?»