Detecting Manipulation in Cup and Round Robin Sports Competitions

Some of the core attributes of sports are supposed to be integrity, honesty and sportsmanship. However, there have been numerous cases where individual athletes and teams have thrown games and colluded to manipulate sports competitions. Much of the previous work has focused on proving that some types of competitions are computationally hard to manipulate and thus possibly resistant to manipulation. In contrast, in this paper we focus on detecting patterns of manipulations in sports competitions by coalitions of teams. We show that it is possible to successfully detect certain patterns of manipulations in cups and round robins, two of the most common types of sports competitions. The practical benefit of our approach is a tool that can be used by competition organizers to highlight suspicious play within the competition and so aid in the detection of cheating coalitions.