Competitors may also intentionally perform poorly to gain a future advantage, such as a better draft pick[1] or to face an easier opponent in a later round of competition.
Hustling, where a player disguises his abilities until he can play for large amounts of money, is a common practice in many cue sports, such as nine-ball pool.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the only one of the four major professional sports leagues of the United States and Canada in which home advantage in the playoffs is based strictly on regular-season records without regard to seeding.
As the match entered stoppage time, Indonesian defender Mursyid Effendi scored an own goal, overcoming the efforts of several Thai players and the goalkeeper to stop him.
Winning the division would have given New York an ALDS matchup against the Texas Rangers, who at the time had star pitcher Cliff Lee; the Yankees instead defeated the Minnesota Twins, a team they historically have had more postseason success against.
Additional allegations came up in 2012 when Yankees general manager Brian Cashman commented in response to a possible playoff expansion that his team had "conceded the division" and that winning it meant "nothing more than a T-shirt and a hat".
[14][15] However, Cashman insisted that the Yankees were not motivated by any desire to lose games, but were merely ensuring their best players were well-rested for the postseason, which he contended was perfectly ethical behavior.
For example, In February 2015, two girls' basketball teams representing Nashville-area Riverdale and Smyrna High Schools were found to be tanking during a consolation match of their district tournament.
Since the Czechs had already clinched first place in the group, this move was seen to have the potential to allow Germany a better chance to get the win they needed to advance at the expense of the winner of the Netherlands–Latvia game.
In the 1983–84 season, several teams were accused of deliberately losing games in an attempt to gain a top position in the 1984 draft, which would eventually produce four Hall of Fame players.
This lottery system prevented teams from receiving fixed draft positions based on record place, which the league hoped would discourage them from deliberately losing.
On December 2, 1896, former Old West lawman Wyatt Earp refereed the Fitzsimmons vs. Sharkey boxing match, promoted as the Heavyweight Championship of the World.
As a result, FIFA changed its tournament scheduling for subsequent World Cups so that the final pair of matches in each group are played simultaneously.
An alleged example of this was when the San Francisco 49ers, who had clinched a playoff berth, lost their regular-season finale in 1988 to the Los Angeles Rams, thereby knocking the New York Giants (who had defeated the 49ers in the playoffs in both 1985 and 1986, moreover injuring 49ers quarterback Joe Montana in the latter) out of the postseason on the intra-conference record tiebreaker; after the game, Giants quarterback Phil Simms angrily accused the 49ers of "laying down like dogs.
Proponents of the UEFA tie-breaker argue that it reduces the value of blow-outs, whether these be the result of a much stronger team running up the score or an already-eliminated side allowing an unusually large number of goals.
Typically, to forestall so much as any perception of impropriety, such teams will be prohibited from trading directly with each other and any head-to-head match(es) will usually be scheduled early in the season to ensure there are no obvious championship and/or playoff implications.
An example of this arrangement occurred in the early 21st century in the Canadian Football League; between 2010 and 2015, the BC Lions and the Toronto Argonauts were owned by the same person.
[50] Whenever any serious motivation for teams to manipulate results becomes apparent to the general public, there can be a corresponding effect on betting markets as honest gamblers speculate in good faith as to the chance such a fix might be attempted.
[52] The ancient Olympic Games were almost constantly dealing with allegations of athletes accepting bribes to lose a competition[53] and city-states which often tried to manipulate the outcome with large amounts of money.
[52] Yaochō (八百長) is a Japanese word meaning a cheating activity which is committed at places where a match, fight, game, competition, or other contest, is held, where the winner and loser are decided in advance by agreement of the competitors or related people.
[50] Similarly, in Indian Premier League in 2013, S. Sreesanth and two other players were banned by the Board of Control for Cricket in India for alleged match fixing.
[59][60][61] In July 2022, it was reported that local authorities had shut down an operation in Gujarat, India, that had been running a fictitious, kayfabe version of the Indian Premier League in an attempt to scam Russian sports betters.
Broadcasts of the "matches" were streamed on YouTube, and utilized artificial crowd noise, a sound-alike of cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle, and camera angles that never showed clear shots of the pitch, players, or deliveries.
[67][68] By contrast, when the WWF co-founded an American football league with NBC known as the XFL (which played for a single season in 2001), the league had to emphasize that its games were not staged in this manner (despite drawing upon wrestling, and in particular the WWF's "Attitude Era", in its overall image and presentation), and specifically promoted the willingness of Las Vegas bookmakers to take wagers on the games as evidence of its legitimacy.
[69][70] In the 1950s, the producers of several televised quiz shows in the United States were found to have engaged in match fixing, as part of an effort to boost viewer interest and ratings.
Geritol demanded that Barry & Enright Productions make changes to the show, which included the outright choreography of contestants around predetermined outcomes.
[71][72] The most infamous example of this strategy came when champion Herbert Stempel was to be replaced by Charles Van Doren—a Columbia University English teacher whom the producers felt would be more popular with viewers.
The investigation similarly revealed that Revlon—the sponsor of The $64,000 Question—had instructed the show's producers to balance its questions more favorably towards contestants they felt would be more popular among viewers (although it stopped short of outright rigging games to the same extent as Twenty-One).
[72][73][74][75] Match fixing controversies have also emerged in Esports, including in particular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, League of Legends, Overwatch, Paladins, StarCraft.
[80] In addition, several federations run integrity tours where players and officials participate in educational workshops on how match fixing work and how they are prevented.