Corruption in Olympic Sports: Prevalence Estimations of Match Fixing Among German Squad Athletes

Although match fixing threatens the integrity of competitions in sport, studies on the prevalence of match fixing are scarce. We measured the prevalence of competition manipulation by German elite athletes and the total percentage of these athletes who had been asked to participate in match fixing by using the randomized response technique. Approximately 8% of the athletes were asked to participate in match fixing, and approximately 7.5% were actually involved in competition manipulation during their careers. More than 30% of athletes reported an attempt to illegally influence referees’ decisions, but only 4.9% had ever directly participated in such attempts. Only the parameter of the financial status provides a different perspective. In general, this study shows that the dissemination of deviant behavior is not extremely high.