Meet the speakers: “Sport often looks at issues of integrity and manipulation rather than crime”
With over two decades in law enforcement and experience from Europol, Arthur Whitehead joins Play the Game 2025 to speak about why serious and organised crime poses far broader threats to sport than most people realise, from financial fraud to human trafficking.
What is your personal motivation for researching crime in sport?
I have over 20 years of experience in various law enforcement agencies tackling serious and organised crime (SOC). During a four-year posting to Europol, I was asked to look at the relationship between crime and sport to better understand the risks.
Working in this role gave me a unique perspective on the pertinent issues in sport, as well as understanding the pressure on worldwide law enforcement as crime becomes more technologically advanced and global in its reach.
Understanding what role law enforcement could or should play in sport is a subject I find fascinating, and I was offered the opportunity to formally study crime in sport for my PhD. The study focuses on understanding the risks to sport as well as prioritisation and risk identification to combat and manage threats from SOC to sport.
What would you describe as the most important findings of your research?
The fact that SOC criminals find sport an attractive industry to involve themselves in is not a new concept. However, when I came to look at this issue, I found a heavy focus on competition manipulation from law enforcement partners. This surprised me.
Very quickly, I identified the variety of threats that each sport faces and the limited focus on these pertinent issues. The categorization of serious and organised crime includes drug trafficking, child sexual abuse and exploitation, financial crimes, human trafficking, fraud and cyber offences.
All these crimes touch on sport in sometimes surprising ways, but understanding what the actual threats are to individual sports, countries and organisations is underdeveloped and visceral rather than evidence-based, and therefore often fails to get the attention it requires.
My study maps the prevalent offences, threats, risks, probabilities, and consequences, and places them into a risk management matrix.
What do you perceive as serious criminal threats to sport today?
To make it manageable, my study uses UK Criminal law as the basis of assessing serious and organised crime, and the study is therefore defined by UK legislation and policy.
Crime in sport is just one of my portfolios, and in my day-to-day role tackling SOC, I work with INTERPOL, Europol, UNODC in addition to global law enforcement agencies. This has given me a unique perspective on where the threats to sport lie in a global context.
Understanding the threats to individuals, teams, and organisations often depends on where you are looking at the issue from. There is no “one size fits all approach", and I work with global partners to understand and mitigate risks. International opportunities for joint working on financial crime, modern slavery and abuse and exploitation are a particular focus, as these are universal priorities across most countries and law enforcement agencies.
How would you describe the changing face of serious and organised crime in sport?
Serious and organised crime has changed in society as a whole, and it is able to operate transnationally and adapt to its environment; consequently, sport needs to keep pace with the evolving risks.
When you look at other industries like retail or the finance sector, they have responses in place to identify risks from serious and organised crime; however, sport often looks at issues of integrity and manipulation rather than crime.
Those involved in serious and organised crime are often the most plausible and trusted individuals and often hide in plain view. Sport integrity has its own language, customs, and even courts and tribunals, which are separate from the criminal justice system, and criminals can make use of the gap between these parallel systems.
There will be a role for evolving technologies to tackle the threats, but we need to understand what the threats and risks are in order to use those tools effectively.
Why is it necessary to redefine the current focus on crime in sport?
Redefining the focus is important as it often feels like the conversations on this topic are a world away from the current demands being placed on law enforcement.
For sport to engage and influence policy, it has to explain what the actual contemporary risks are from external criminal actors. Sport tells stories like no other industry, but can often focus on one case or issue to try to explain a far more complex environment.
To understand crime in sport, you have to understand the things that criminals find attractive and stay up to date with the global criminal threats and risks, rather than referring to historical cases.
Crime is corrosive, and preparation and protection are key tools in protecting sports from serious and organised crime. All those involved in sports integrity need to accept that some of the resources currently focused on traditional integrity issues should be utilised to examine SOC issues. Only then will law enforcement be more aligned and able to identify opportunities to work together.
