Australian soccer’s governing body is taking a cut from bets placed on games at all levels in the country, from international blockbusters to amateur suburban club competitions.

This includes some games played by teenagers, with punters able to place detailed bets on who will be leading at half-time, who wins or whether there will be a draw.

Football Australia’s secretive arrangement is just one of many similar deals struck between major international bookmakers and Australian sporting bodies, including the NRL, AFL and Cricket Australia.

The agreements, obtained by Four Corners, show some governing bodies can earn a commission of up to 17.5 per cent of bookmaker’s profits from Australians gambling on their events.

These payments — known as product integrity fees — total millions of dollars each year and are on top of the flood of gambling money already coming into the organisations from sponsorship and advertising.

While most sporting codes only permit punters to bet on the two highest tiers of the competition, Football Australia gets a cut whether it is the Socceroos and Matildas or local social teams.

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.

That means even if the bookmaker takes a loss on a bet, Football Australia still gets paid.

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

In one of those games, a West Australian under-20s side fielded multiple 17-year-old players and had a 15-year-old on the bench.

The man on the sidelines

At a nondescript 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.

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

Data scouts like him are key to the operation of gambling companies in Australia. Because local games at this level are rarely live streamed, they send live updates to bookmakers so punters across the world can bet on matches in real time.

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

“It’s disturbing,” said South Springvale Football Club president Jim Simos. The club’s team plays in the fifth-tier Victorian State League 1 competition.

“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 that specialises in collecting live data at sporting events.

He wears a lanyard showing the governing body has given him accreditation to attend the game.

Sportradar boasts a network of more than 5,000 scouts around the world, collecting data from almost a million sporting events every year

The Nasdaq-listed company has deals with most of the major US sporting codes and generated almost $1.2 billion in revenue last year. It counts NBA icon Michael Jordan and billionaire Mark Cuban among its investors.

“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.”

Bet365 is among Sportradar’s biggest customers

Prasad Kanitkar, a former trader with Bet365, said even suburban Australian soccer matches can attract 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.

“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.”

Bet365 did not respond to questions about the size or value of betting markets on Australian amateur soccer. In response to questions on the recent South Springvale match, it said the total betting market on the game “made up a very low monetary level”.

“Any claims otherwise about the value and number of bets taken on this event and other similar Australian soccer events are simply untrue,” it said.

The match-fixing risk

The national match-fixing watchdog has warned that offering gambling on low-level games increases 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.

Sport integrity specialist Dr Catherine Ordway said amateur clubs — like South Springvale — were especially vulnerable.

“All those forces coming together just make the risk enormous,” she said.

Club president Jim Simos said South Springvale 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.”

Football Australia declined an interview request, but in a statement said it allowed betting on the lower-level competitions “as a strategy to maintain oversight and protect the game from potential integrity threats through information sharing”.

“We’re acutely aware of the potential risks and have a comprehensive integrity framework in place to manage these risks,” it said.

“In 2022, domestic product fees accounted for a very low portion of our total revenue. These fees are reinvested in our integrity services and various not-for-profit football development programs.”

NRL, AFL, cricket have deals with bookies

Concerns about the relationship between sporting codes and bookmakers are not limited to soccer.

Four Corners has seen agreements between bookmakers and the NRL, AFL and Cricket Australia.

None of these codes disclose in their financial statements how much their deals with international gambling companies are worth.

But the NRL told Four Corners it earned $50 million from agreements with bookmakers last year, while the AFL is understood to have made between $30-$40 million.

The NRL earns a larger commission on riskier bets, such as “same game multis”, which allow punters to bet on multiple outcomes within a single game.

In a statement, the NRL said its agreement with bookmakers allows it to limit the range of games available for betting in Australia.

“This is done to safeguard the integrity of the sport and such agreements obviously restrict commercial outcomes,” it said.

“Wagering makes up a relatively small, but important revenue stream which is reinvested into the game’s integrity, education, wellbeing, and participation programs.”

Live streams used for gambling

International betting markets have found other community sports to gamble on, including a weeknight T20 cricket competition in Melbourne’s suburbs.

At one match, between Maribyrnong Park Cricket Club and Chargers CC, there are no data scouts but people around the world can still tune in to the action.

The club live streams the games online, using a Cricket Australia-endorsed service called Frogbox.

Maribyrnong Park Cricket Club president Simon Fitzgerald said the club invested in Frogbox so players’ friends and family could watch matches, as well as to generate advertising revenue for the club.

The club was unaware that Frogbox is owned by Sportradar.

“To find that somebody would be interested in a northwestern Melbourne, obscure cricket T20 competition is extraordinary to say the least,” Mr Fitzgerald said.

Sportradar insists it does not sell the live feeds or any data from the matches to its bookmaker clients.

But at least one company was offering bets on the match.

1xBet — a bookmaker registered in the Caribbean nation of Curacao — is among offshore companies offering bets on amateur cricket leagues, including the under-18s competition in Melbourne’s south-east.

Its website is blocked in Australia because it is not licensed to operate in the country, but it can be accessed by a virtual private network that allows users to mask their location.

1xBet did not respond to questions about where it sources information about the matches.

The company is not registered in Australia so it is not required to pay product fees to Cricket Australia.

Sport Integrity Australia’s Jason Whybrow said his agency was concerned unlicensed offshore bookmakers could use the live feeds to gather information about matches and offer live betting markets on them.

“If ever there’s availability of data or streaming for a sport, someone in the world will seek to monetise that by perhaps having a sports betting market on that event,” he said.

Cricket Australia said it was aware of betting on livestreamed amateur matches, but it was up to clubs to geo-block their feeds so they cannot be accessed by unlicensed bookmakers.

“We encourage clubs to report any approaches or other suspicious behaviour, but we are not aware of any evidence to suggest this has resulted in integrity issues,” it said.

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