Tennis Match-Fixing Should Worry U.S. Sports

Even with the Australian Open underway in Melbourne, the tennis world's big topic is a damning report by the BBC and BuzzFeed News UK alleging pervasive match-fixing over the past decade. As the scandal plays out, it will provide a cautionary tale not just for the sport, but for the future of legalized sports betting in the U.S.

Documents obtained by the outlets point to 28 players who in 2008 were flagged for possibly throwing matches by the Tennis Integrity Unit, the sport's anti-corruption body. While the news organizations chose not to name the accused, they reported that 16 of the players in question have been ranked in the world's top 50. Investigators suspected that thousands of dollars were bet on fixed matches, including three Wimbledon matches. Tennis adopted a new anticorruption code in 2009 and chose not to retroactively investigate the flagged players because of legal advice, the report says, even though match-fixing was explicitly illegal under previous iterations of the code.