The ABC‘s Four Corners program on Monday had a very troubling report on global sports betting companies allowing punters to wager on amateur community sports. The Four Corners report revealed how one can bet on a game in the fifth-tier competition by South Springvale FC and Football Australia (FAA) garners a share of domestic bets on their matches.

Four Corners also revealed that the FAA is making a cut of the wagers made on games across all levels within the country.

This encompasses matches, ranging from high-profile international clashes to games played by amateur suburban clubs. Shockingly, even matches featuring teenagers are not exempt, as bettors can place intricate bets on halftime leaders, match winners, or the possibility of a draw.

Football Australia has preserved a pall of mystery surrounding this agreement. However, this is not an isolated incident, as several major international bookmakers have entered similar deals with other Australian sporting bodies. These include prominent organisations such as the NRL, AFL, and Cricket Australia.

Football Australia’s private arrangement is only one of many similar deals struck between the NRL, AFL and Cricket Australia.

Four Corners revealed how these agreements can earn a commission of up to 17.5 per cent of bookmaker’s profits from Australians gambling on their events.

These payments total millions of dollars annually on top of the flood of gambling money coming into the organisations from sponsorship and advertising.

The secret agreement shows Football Australia gets either 1 per cent of every bet placed in Australia on a soccer game or 15 per cent of the bookmaker’s profit — whichever is higher.

If the bookmaker takes a loss on a bet, Football Australia still gets paid.

In only one weekend, in May, bookmaker Bet365 was offering bets on 146 soccer games around Australia — including under-20s competitions in New South Wales and Western Australia.

A West Australian under-20s side open to wagers, fielded multiple 17-year-old players and had a 15-year-old on the bench.

The man on the sidelines

At an unremarkable football oval in Melbourne’s suburbs, a man wearing a lanyard sits in a fold-out chair on the sidelines of a weekend soccer game.

A data scout, on the sideline of a weekend amateur soccer game last month.

As spectators cheer on the South Springvale team — made up of plumbers, electricians, and a doctor — the man observes the action while tapping away on his phone.

Data scouts like him send live updates to bookmakers so punters across the world can bet on matches in real time.

Several international bookmakers offer bets on this game alone, including British gambling giant Bet365.

“It’s disturbing,” said South Springvale Football Club Aris president Jim Simos on Four Corners.

“There are people across the world that could be betting on our games that have got no idea who we are. There’s got to be a limit to it.”

The data scout, who declined to provide his name, works for Sportradar — a Swiss corporation collects live data at sporting events.

Data collection sold onto global betting companies

Sportradar has a network of more than 5,000 scouts around the world, all collecting data from up to a million sporting events every year.

“Sportradar is one of several companies that collects data in various ways from sporting competitions in Australia,” it said in a statement.

“We may distribute that data to licensed bookmakers around the world and if so, subject those customers to rigorous compliance and background check. We also use the data we collect to inform our bet monitoring and detection of suspicious betting patterns for integrity partners including Football Australia.”

Michael Jordan owns a stake in Sportradar and Bet365 is among Sportradar’s biggest customers.

Prasad Kanitkar, a former trader with Bet365, said even suburban Australian soccer matches thousands of bets every minute from the bookmaker’s international customers — largely based in Asia.

He said it wasn’t unusual to see bets totalling up to $1 million on a single game.

“Just the pure volume that you see, it’s quite shocking,” he said.

Open to fixing at community level sports

“If you’re not in the industry you wouldn’t have a clue. There are always more sports coming available, more and more leagues available. It’s a machine that doesn’t really stop.”

Asked why punters would be interested in betting on amateur sport, Mr Kanitkar said it’s simple, “If you can bet on something, people do.”

“I think to them it is a bit like a casino where they might be just looking at what’s on … clicking away on the website and hoping for the best.”

The national match-fixing watchdog has warned that offering gambling on low-level games can increase the risk that players could be approached to throw a match.

“If you are getting paid nothing and someone offers you some money, you might be tempted to take that,” said Jason Whybrow, the director of sports wagering and competition manipulation at Sport Integrity Australia.

On the Four Corners program, South Springvale Football Club president Jim Simos was shocked to learn his team’s games are being bet on by people around the world.

Club president Jim Simos said South Springvale Aris had not received any training or information about how to deal with the increased risk of match-fixing.

“Football Australia hasn’t come to us as a collective and said, ‘Hey, be careful of this.’ That just hasn’t occurred at all.”

Watch Four Corners‘ full investigation into the world of sports betting tonight on ABC TV and ABC Interview.