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ESL has today announced a partnership with Sportradar which will see industry-level statistics and anti-fraud support brought to eSports betting.
The deal includes Sportradar’s Fraud Detection System which will monitor 450 betting operators worldwide to identify ‘suspicious betting patterns and behaviours’ on the outcomes of ESL’s tournaments.
"The rapid growth and expansion of the eSports industry presents us with an ever increasing myriad of, not only opportunities, but also challenges, the most important of which is arguably the preservation of the integrity of the competitions," said ESL CEO Ralf Reichert, at Stamford Bridge Stadium today.
The announcement was made as part of the Leaders Conference taking place in the London sporting venue, and represents another step for standardised regulation in the industry.
"ESL has led the charge on integrity in eSports for many years with proprietary anti-cheating software and the recent introduction of anti-doping policies in its tournaments," Reichert continued. "With an ever increasing volume of betting on eSports competitions, expanding our anti-fraud initiative to also include match fixing, collusion and other activities related to illegal, underage and irresponsible betting, was the next logical step in our efforts to preserve and promote integrity across our many competitions."
The benefit for Sportradar is exclusive rights to process and distribute real-time match data, including deep fantasy-level detail, as well as offering live-scoring to global customers.
This is a ripe commodity for the traditional sports company to control as recent leaps in fantasy draft support have seen industry leaders DraftKings and FanDuel enter the eSports market.
In fact, in August this year, Sportradar announced an agreement with FanDuel to supply their NFL fantasy play-by-play data.
"ESports is without a doubt the fastest growing sport blogally across all measurables: prize money, fan viewership, sponsorship revenue," said Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl, also in attendance at the London conference.
"[ESL] are at the vanguard of this exciting sector. By partnering with us, they have today made a clear statement that they want to be the eSports innovator with the most sophisticate, most engaging and most beneficial relationship with their data, and those interested in that data."
Sportradar’s data support will be implemented in Dota 2 and CS:GO within ‘the next few months’ with further titles that ESL runs competitions for to follow.
