A “single focus” on betting-related abuse would not solve the wider problem facing athletes, Sportradar has said, as bosses outlined its broader approach to tackling online harassment.
The sports data giant partnered with the Association of Tennis Professionals and Tennis Data Innovations to launch Safe Sport, an AI service to protect players from online abuse, in July 2024.
In figures presented at the company’s ‘Game, Set, Tech’ event at its London HQ this week, it was revealed that 4.76 million comments have been scanned since Safe’s Sport’s launch.
Of those comments, 420,000 were classified as severe and 300,000 were abusive, with 93% of monitored accounts receiving at least one abusive comment.
When looking at the abusive profiles, 41 profiles had posted over 200 abusive comments each. The study also found 116,000 unique abusive profiles.
In the first few months of 2026, nearly 900,000 comments were analysed with over 60,000 abusive messages identified. In Q1, one tennis player received over 900 abusive messages.
When asked by EGR how many of the abuse comments were related to gambling, Adam Pennock, Sportradar vice-president of risk and investigations, said it was a “very small number” but that every message stemmed from a “trigger point”.
He said: “If you take something like that, it’s so difficult to actually provide any context as to what a trigger is for that.
“We don’t have a clear number because, frankly, there’d be a lot of guesswork into it because a very small number of comments that we see actually relate to something about monetary loss or something like that.
“Most of what we see is quite generic racist, homophobic, misogynist discrimination rather than a target related to monetary loss.
“What we do see, and this is consistent across the board, every sport that we look at, is that there is a trigger moment, and that moment might be a match result. It might be a race result.”
When asked if gambling-related abusive messages would be tracked going forward, Pennock said it was a small element of a bigger problem and that it won’t be solved focusing on particular type of abuse.
He added: “What I see from working across multiple different sports and lots of different conversations is that if we go with this and try and just have a single focus, we’re not going to solve the problem at all.
“Let’s say you could click your fingers and any betting-related abuse just stopped. That’s not going to change the landscape of what we’re looking at because actually it exists very much outside of the betting landscape as well.
“We’re not saying, ‘Right, we’re going to really focus in on betting-related abuse’, because that’s just one small element of what we see across sports.”
Earlier this year, BetMGM updated its terms of service to state that customers who abused athletes would have their accounts suspended.
Last year, the NCAA, in partnership with Venmo, launched a dedicated hotline to report abuse and best practice guide for student-athletes on how to stay safe on social media platforms.
In 2024, the NCAA released a study that showed 12% of abusive messages, 743, were related to sports betting.
Sportradar unveiled its Q1 results earlier this week with management insisting the grey market represented a very small portion of revenue, in the wake of short seller reports about alleged partnering with unlicensed operators.
The post Sportradar: Gambling-related abuse aimed at athletes is a “very small number” first appeared on EGR Intel.
Vice-president of risk and investigations Adam Pennock says abusive sports betting-linked messages make up a minor portion of overall athlete abuse, which is predominantly racist, homophobic or misogynistic
The post Sportradar: Gambling-related abuse aimed at athletes is a “very small number” first appeared on EGR Intel.