Federer wants names in match-fixing allegations

Novak Djokovic branded match-fixing as a “crime in sport” and confirmed he was offered £110,000 in 2006 to lose a first round match in St Petersburg.

Andy Murray says tennis should do more to educate young players about the dangers of match-fixing after top stars were implicated in a betting scandal.

The bombshell report was released on the eve of the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tournament of the season, which started in Melbourne on January 18. “Of course, we threw it away right away”, said Djokovic. “It didn’t even get to me – there was nothing out of it”.

“Honestly it’s on a borderline, I would say”, Djokovic said.

“Somebody may call it an opportunity. The sport has a zero-tolerance approach which is enforced with the full powers of the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program, which includes lifetime bans and punitive financial penalties”, the organisation said in a statement.

The report – based on information from a “cache of leaked documents” from a 2008 probe commissioned by tennis authorities, the statistical analysis of 26,000 tennis matches and betting information from 2009 through 2015 – alleges that some players were paid to throw matches and that tennis officials did not act on the findings.

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Jolts of the breaking news were also felt in Indian tennis with CNN-IBN learning that there could be a possibility of Chennai Open, India’s only ATP tournament, also being used as a platform to fix matches. “I think when people come with those sums of money when you’re that age, I think sometimes people can make mistakes”, Murray told reporters.

The BBC and Buzzfeed News did not name the players they claimed were the subject of the investigations. They were dealt with.

“From my knowledge and information about match-fixing or anything similar, there is nothing happening on the top level, as far as I know”, the world number one said.

The head of Tennis Ireland Des Allen said the allegations did not come as a shock but he insisted no Irish players were involved.

Gilles Simon, a member of the Association of Tennis Professionals’ Player Council, said: “It is a bit like anti-doping – you feel like someone is dropping a bomb on the first day of a Slam”.

Murray said the sport was sending mixed messages by allowing betting company William Hill to become one of the Australian Open’s sponsor’s this year and advertise on the tournament’s three main show courts.

“I think across all sports, I don’t think that that’s done particularly well”. And, yeah, I guess as a player you just want to be made aware kind of everything that’s going on. Reports of corruption and match fixing in tennis surface which could end up giving sport a black eye.

The London-based Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) was set up in 2008 by all the sport’s four governing bodies – the men’s ATP, women’s WTA, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the Grand Slam Board – to address concerns that the betting frauds besetting cricket and soccer were also targeting tennis. “I don’t have yet the stand and clear opinion about that”.

“Not that I’m aware of”, the American said.

According to insiders, match-fixing was rife in the mid-2000s, but then the celebrated Solpot match of 2007 – in which €4.5m was staked on Betfair for an otherwise obscure encounter between Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo Arguello – changed the playing field. It’s hard to say.