Every day on the gambling site 1xbet, thousands of sports matches air that the degenerate gambler can lay odds on. There are games like hockey, soccer, and basketball but they don’t look quite right. Everything is broadcast from low-resolution cameras more at home in a horror movie than a sports organization and the games are modified to have fewer players and end quickly. A game of “short football,” a kind of miniaturized soccer, can end in 10 minutes. Some of the games involve players as young as 14.
A joint investigation between Bellingcat and Josimar dove deep into the surreal, off-putting, and borderline illegal world of 1xbet. The site is a large gambling website with millions of daily viewers. It’s illegal to access the site in several countries, including the United States.
One day in September, the online gambling website 1xbet live-streamed 1,297 games of “short football.” A match is around 10 minutes long and played on a small field between teams of three to five players. The report estimated that 1xbet may be airing half a million games every year.
These games are not played for the love of the sport. It’s obvious from the footage that these games are about industrialized gambling. There is no cheering crowd or fancy camerawork, the players appear in converted warehouse spaces filmed from low-resolution cameras that call to mind the early cam-girl era. If there is a crowd of cheering fans, they come in the form of a sticker plastered on the wall of a small room where a game is played.
People are betting on air hockey, cricket matches played between teams of two, table tennis, and games like bench soccer and table basketball. In bench soccer, two players sit opposite each other on benches and kick a ball back and forth trying to score goals on each other. Table basketball is like air hockey with a plastic ball played on a glowing arcade cabinet machine.
Bellingcat was able to cross-reference some of the players with social media profiles and discovered the locations of many of the arenas. Some of the games are broadcast from Ukraine and Russia and involve 14 and 15-year-old teens. Josimar tracked down one of the adult players of short football who described a shady operation where he worked from 9 AM to 2 PM and was paid about $30 per day.
1xbet was founded by Dmitry Kazorin, Roman Semiokhin, and Sergey Karshkov. Russia issued an international arrest warrant against the three of them in 2020 for crimes related to organized crime and online gambling. The site is banned in multiple countries but continues to thrive and is estimated to rake in billions of dollars a year.
The site also has big-time and legitimate sponsors. In July, Spanish football club FC Barcelona announced a partnership with 1xbet that will run until 2029. It also signed actress Urvashi Rautela as its brand ambassador to India, a country where it’s not legally allowed to operate.