In 1961, Viv Nicholson, a factory worker from Castleford, won a £152,000 jackpot, external-link equivalent to almost £5m today. Within months, hundreds of thousands of fans were filling in weekly coupons, attempting to predict Saturday afternoon's results in the hope of winning cash prizes. The Football Pools started 90 years ago this year. Some markets are time specific - offering odds on whether there might be a goal, card, corner or penalty in the first five minutes of the match, for example. You can bet on the first and last goalscorer, the correct score, the half-time score, number of goals, whether there will be a sending-off, a hat-trick, penalty or the amount of corners. Licensed bookies offer upwards of 200 different markets on matches around the globe. While betting in Asia is usually restricted to a limited range, the array of options in Europe are far more than the traditional straightforward choices of win, lose or draw. It has seized over $27m (£16.8m) in cash, and closed down illegal gambling dens which handled bets worth more than $2bn (£1.2bn). International crime investigation body Interpol says its Operation Soga has carried out more than 2,300 raids on properties worldwide as part of its drive to disrupt match fixers. 'It doesn't sound a great deal but it is still 500 or so matches that are potentially fixed and we are talking potentially millions of pounds in turnover on these matches which is running through criminal activities,' says Small. Concerns are raised with about 1% of fixtures monitored. Sportradar has contracts to monitor betting on some 55,000 matches a year, running algorithms which cover 350 global bookmakers, to spot suspicious betting patterns. 'The current estimations, which include both the illegal markets and the legal markets, suggest the sports match-betting industry is worth anywhere between $700bn and $1tn (£435bn to £625bn) a year,' says Darren Small, director of integrity at betting and sports data analysts Sportradar.Ībout 70% of that trade has been estimated to come from trading on football. How much is the sports betting industry worth? Here we look at the rise in betting, the risks of corruption and the history of cheating in the sport. However, betting on football is now a worldwide phenomenon with much of the trading carried out on illegal markets in Asia, where the huge sums wagered bring with it the threat of match-fixing.

Sports betting industry growth