Can Sport Ever Really Fight Corruption? One Organisation is Trying.
In 1997, Play the Game was created to help sport find its conscience. But nearly three decades on, its founder says it's still a long way off.
When Danish journalist Jens Sejer Andersen launched Play the Game in 1997, the plan may have sounded naïve. Could an organization become a “home for the homeless” and help sport improve its democracy, transparency, and freedom of speech?
Looking at the global sports landscape in 2025, it’s been a hard task. Saudi Arabia’s chokehold on many sports is tightening, the ramifications of runaway sports betting are still being understood, and match-fixing continues to increase.
But Play the Game is far from giving up. Its ClearingSport project proposes the creation of an international entity able to counter crime, corruption, and other breaches of integrity in sport.
The Sports and Crime Briefing sat down with Andersen to learn more.
Sports and Crime Briefing: You stepped down as Chairman of Play the Game earlier this year after more than 25 years. What is the biggest change you saw in the sports integrity landscape over that time?
Jens Sejer Andersen: The integrity landscape has grown immensely. When we started in 1997, these issues were taboo. People would talk about a few rotten apples, but corruption, crime, the abuse of sport for political purposes were rarely talked about. Those who did bring them up were told they were the problem, not sport.
That lasted until around the 2010s with the FIFA scandals. That was a turning point, in my view. It is no longer possible for sports leaders to claim these problems don’t exist.
And the biggest achievement at Play the Game over that time has been to play a considerable role in shaping the international agenda. Thanks to the very courageous, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, academics, and others who have shared their insights and taken a risk by appearing at our conference, these messages became impossible to ignore.
However, while we’ve achieved change in moving the agenda forward, the reality in sport has become worse. Play the Game needs to maintain its original role and be a home for the homeless in sport. There are still people who have nowhere to go, because they have inconvenient experiences or inconvenient knowledge.
But we must also qualify the debate. We would never say all sports leaders are bad. We always invite sports leaders, hoping they are willing to engage in dialogue. Far too few are.
SCB: Sports integrity has become an industry, but there have been some times. The recent International Table Tennis Federation elections in Qatar turned ugly with a presidential candidate attacking his sport’s integrity department, Starlizard is shutting down its integrity services, and sports bodies seem to often only be dealing out token sanctions. Has the integrity sector become more political showpiece than watchdog?
JSA: No zone is interest-free; every institution depends on funding and alliances. Still, there are ideals of integrity we can work toward, and the sector is mushrooming—commercial players like Sportradar, lone consultants, public-sector anti-doping labs, match-fixing units, the International Testing Agency (ITA). Overall that growth is positive, but transparency about who backs you and how you are governed is crucial.
The Sport Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA) illustrates the dilemma. On the surface it stages slick conferences in five-star hotels, partners with UEFA and others, and looks impressive. Under the surface it traces back to the International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS) —an offshoot of Qatari military intelligence—so I’m skeptical. That link doesn’t mean SIGA can’t do useful work; there’s enough cheating for everyone to tackle. But I wouldn’t share sensitive information with any organisation so closely tied to a state security apparatus. Integrity demands sunlight, not opaque funding streams.
SCB: One of the big changes since FIFAGate in 2015 seems to be that talking about sports integrity isn’t taboo anymore. But talking about it hasn’t removed the shame of the taboo. Do you agree that there remains an expectation of impunity throughout the sports industry?
JSA: In my view, the turning point came with the scandals surrounding the FIFA World Cup hosting rights in late 2010 and it was certainly reinforced in 2015 when the FBI and the Swiss police raided the FIFA Congress hotel.
But still , sports organisations can rely on a long tradition of respect of their autonomy. The healthy root of this concept was that sports fall under freedom of association. Sports organizations were amateur, they were relatively poor and dependent on a few rich noblemen.
Now that it’s big multinational business with strong geopolitical interests, it becomes problematic that nobody checks if the rulers actually apply their own rules on themselves.
The IOC says it holds the federations accountable to the highest standards of governance. That’s not true. They don't hold them accountable or avoid doing so until it’s the very last option. In the case of Kuwait’s Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah (whose tenure as IOC member ended in March 2025), he was only given a ban until after he had continued to meddle in Asian elections at least ten years too late.
SCB: So what is the solution?
JSA: For the last 20 years, I’ve been arguing that we need an all-encompassing sports integrity agency that would monitor governance and would coordinate the fight against match-fixing and illegal betting.
Sports federations would answer with fierce resistance, saying “We don’t need another WADA.” Governments respond with resignation seeing it as “more bureaucracy, more work.”
At our 2022 Play The Game conference, we put the issue to our delegates to see if there was interest. There was indeed much impatience in the room and Play the Game was called upon to act. Based on that, we designed the ClearingSport project with around two hundred experts surveyed and an advisory group formed. In 2025, we presented our draft set up for such an institution.
There are still open questions, of course, but there are many reasons impunity endures in sport. The governance of sports bodies is the root cause because sports governance is usually based on voluntary self-regulation.
Our proposal has been criticized for not consulting sport and governments broadly, but this is the next step in the process. If we had tried to bind sport and governments into discussions from scratch—we were convinced nothing would happen. So we decided to gather the best experts, the people with their hands in the dirt, and ask: How would you like to see this? How can your work be enhanced? We had broad representation in our survey and advisory group. With our proposal, there’s no excuse: you can’t say it’s unrealistic—we’ve shown workable elements.
You can call that the wrong choice or the right one—time will tell. I never expected this to happen overnight.
SCB: According to the UNODC we’re looking at a criminal economy in sport worth roughly $1.7 trillion a year. Who is realistically supposed to fight an industry that size?
JSA: Public authorities, in theory—but in many countries the gambling lobby is so strong it can bend the rules. Police can be corrupted and, more often, just look the other way. Even those prosecutors who want to fight crime in sport have only recently started coordinating through the Council of Europe’s MARS network of prosecutors. But they face difficulties working across national borders. Until we agree on a standard legal framework and real enforcement mechanisms, impunity will prevail.
SCB: Let me ask you about the Macolin Convention. It’s a wonderful initiative. But when I speak to different countries, it’s a very fragmented landscape. Some sports prosecutors operate pro bono, some countries don’t have national platforms against sports manipulation years after signing the convention. What’s going on?
JSA: The Macolin Convention was created in 2014 with real momentum and an appetite for action. But it’s now run into a stalemate. There were immediate disagreements within EU countries as to whether this convention could be ratified collectively. Malta said it would oppose any collective ratification and that is explained by the influence of the gambling industry in Malta.
Integrity efforts also suffer from the natural and constant shift of people and politics in democratic countries.
You always meet fresh faces in these forums. They’re smart, but it takes time to gain real insight, and ministerial people usually arrive without a clear mandate. Sports bodies may not send their top brass, but they send the same group again and again. That consistency gives them the edge.
Take WADA: on paper, it’s a 50-50 power split, yet the Olympic Movement rules. Governments rarely speak with one voice; the sports side always does.
SCB: The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) is touted as the gold-standard “independent” model for policing a sport’s ethics. From where you sit, can outsourcing integrity work to agencies like these genuinely remove conflicts of interest, or does it just move the problem somewhere else?
JSA: The idea is sound. External oversight is in a federation’s own interest, because it avoids the obvious conflict of a president trying to prosecute his or her own voters. Look at recent events in table tennis and you see how hard that is. Paying a specialised, arm’s-length body to “do the cleaning” lifts a difficult duty off leadership’s shoulders.
Will an external agency solve every problem in sport? Of course not. Corruption, match-fixing, doping—those run deeper than any single watchdog can reach. But such an agency can solve a lot of the issues and handle investigations, case management, transparent sanctions.
SCB: You call Play the Game “a home for the homeless”—a refuge for people who speak uncomfortable truths. In reality, what happens to whistleblowers once the headlines fade? Are they quietly black-listed from the industry, or are genuine protections and second-career paths finally emerging?
JSA: Most who raise the really difficult issues are left in a harsh place. They’re scandalised inside their sport, sometimes even in their home country, and jobs become scarce. Yuliya and Vitaly Stepanov [who exposed a massive Russian doping scandal in 2014] are a textbook case. They are living in legal limbo in the United States, lacking full citizenship rights and are, in principle, exposed to the risk of deportation.
One pillar of our Clearing Sport proposal is robust whistle-blower protection. It could be set up almost overnight; building an institution is always fiddly, but it’s far from rocket science. WADA is a good example of that. After the Stepanov saga, they invested heavily in safe reporting channels and tangible support.
SCB: China’s recent anti-corruption drive in football—jailing high-profile figures like national coach Li Tie—looks impressive from afar. Do you think it’s for real?
JSA: Investigations like this in China seem to run on a cycle—every five or six years, headlines trumpet mass arrests of presidents and managers. This round feels bigger than before, yet I’d still wait another five years to see if anything truly changes. Chinese football, and perhaps other sports, remain deeply infected by betting-related manipulation. Autocratic countries that use sport to bolster their reputation should at a minimum ensure no doping and no match-fixing, but verifying that is exceptionally hard in politically opaque systems.
SCB: Athletes are pushing harder than ever to have a seat at the decision-making table. Outside of a few elite, they keep saying their voices are not heard. How has Play the Game helped amplify that voice across sports?
JSA: I think our most important effort was that we coordinated the Strengthening Athlete Power in Sport (SAPIS) project together with athlete representatives and academics from across Europe.
We analyzed the various ways athletes can organize and divided them in three groups: independent athlete associations or unions, athlete committees from inside federations, and athlete activist groups.
We have a new generation of athletes who do not accept being ordered to do things, but want to have a say.