Although match-fixing and betting-fraud are fast moving international crimes, deeply infiltrated in the sports universe, they still face an anachronic lack of coherent, systematic and articulated response from sports, governments or society at large. Heterogeneous legal frameworks, reluctancy or even rejection to adopt enforcement measures, difficulties in assessing what should be the right approach and lack of thoughtful and efficient cooperation, all favour the continuous and infamous success and profit for organized crime in recent years. Match-fixing, in fact manipulating the results of matches and contests around the world for the purpose of betting-fraud, is more prevalent today than ever, but in a direct relationship to the increasing prevalence of on-line internationally available gambling on it, and to the clear and virtually unchecked vulnerability of gambling to criminal control and fraud or the lack of adequate and timely mechanisms for information exchange. As identified by several authors, widespread match-fixing occurs in great measure due to the lack of information and awareness of the athletes and/or of adequate and efficient capacity building programs of sport organisations and/or the lack of proper interexchange of information among the key-actors to enable them to counter criminal infiltration. In this framework, BITEFIX project aims to develop and provide innovative and practical tools to enable committed stakeholders (law enforcement authorities, betting regulators and operators, government agencies and sport governing bodies, mainly) to work together against match-fixing and betting-fraud in sports throught the exchange of timely, secure and reliable information and raise awareness about the importance of safeguarding the integrity of sport and of its irreplaceable role in European society, with a special focus on grassroots sports.

 The aim of this project is to strengthen significantly the effectiveness of ongoing private/public policies against match-fixing through a strong focus on training/information sharing on proper competent and tailored implementation of different protected reporting systems, which are very relevant in disrupting the omerta/conspiracy of silence (the main obstacle to contrasting match-fixing) with a very good cost-benefit ratio.  The diffusion of these tools applied to sports is unfortunately still very limited in Europe despite the growing recommendations to use/protect whistleblowers (also Macolin CoE Convention art. 7.2.c).  The Italian Government has conceived and designed an advanced platform for protected reporting in sports which will be piloted since upcoming May 2017. On this solid experimentation base the project will pursue: a) Better understanding, through a solid data-setting; b) Strong tailoring of blended (traditional+e-learning) training models. Double target: 1. top decision makers in primary sport bodies (NOCs, National federations, top Sport Clubs); 2. managers of grassroots clubs where the cultivation of behavior/misbehavior takes place and where match-fixing practices are unfortunately emerging at youth level. The training model will be pilot-implemented in five European countries (Portugal, Italy, Slovenia, Belgium, Spain) to tackle the difficulty of professional and grassroots sports world, unable so far to build autonomously appropriate policies to fight match-fixing which include efficient tailored protected reported systems. It will build a capacity to this regard. The project is based on a very strong cooperation among many relevant actors with special reference to two National Governments and two National Olympic Committees, for the first time involved in such a cooperative process in this topic. The expertise of the partners involved (Universities, private networks ESSA, EASG, NGOs) is outstanding also thanks to previous EU projects.