News: You bet! The Turkish Referee Betting Scandal (and other betting issues)

Yeah, what's tracked in this situation is "X bettor wins more than expected" and then that gets tied to "X makes a lot of bets on this team/player/referee and wins way more 50/50-type bets than expected" to trigger someone to take a closer look. It doesn't start with the referee stats, it starts with someone winning as an outlier and then gets traced to the unusual referee (or player, or whatever) stats.

 

From the article:
"A five-year TFF investigation found 371 of 571 match officials in Turkey held betting accounts, with 152 of those actively gambling.
While some had only bet once, 42 had bet on more than 1,000 football matches - with one official was found to have placed 18,227 bets."

That last figure was insane. If these bets were just in that 5 year window, that's an average of almost 10 bets every day.

 

Exactly. It's not going to find someone who bets $25 on his home team every week, even if they win most bets. If that same person is betting lots of prop bets on the same player/ref/team AND winning almost every bet, eventually that will get flagged and investigated.

 

10 bets every day really doesn’t sound that far-fetched for gambling addicts to be honest.

 

I missed this the first time around, but no MLS referee is going to be able to double their income by betting on these props. The sports books aren't taking $2500 bets on these - they're taking $25 bets. Anyone trying to bet high on these kinds of minor props and winning >55% of the time is going to get flagged immediately by any casino large enough to even list these - and they'll either get cut off, reported for questionable behavior, or both. (Source: this is a thing I know about.)

 

That’s wild, almost half the refs had accounts. Makes you think how strict the rules need to be to keep games fair. Watched some matches while messing around with a Malaysia casino site just to pass time, and it hit me how easy it’d be to spot patterns if refs were betting—it really ruins the trust in the sport.

 

https://www.columbuscrew.com/news/d...spensions-from-mls-for-betting-on-mls-matches

 

I would guess that it would be this slide tackle at 1:28 of the video.

Even though it's well after the pass is made, it's nothing that would be a red flag for anyone watching, other than the suspicious activity.

 

Others are saying it's this play:

Someone found the intentional yellow card in question: https://t.co/snw1hrXoMc

— Joseph Angel (@JoeAngel56) March 9, 2026

 

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/48155514/mls-bans-jones-yeboah-life-betting-own-games

You guys all already beat me to this.

I just love how we live in such a post-truth world and how MLS is just sliding this under the rug. To be fair all leagues are now doing this. Remember all the NBA scandals recently? Forget about it.

The league revealed that though both Jones and Yeboah likely shared conditional information with each other, there was no evidence that suggested the players' betting activity affected the outcome of a match.

By MLS' logic only putting the ball into your own net would affect the outcome of a match.

Also, pretty shocking that the referee didn't give a yellow card on the first clip shown.

 

Yeah, I assumed that this was the play since it was an obvious caution and that he would have done so during the next stoppage (even though it's not on the video). On the play he does give a caution, Gonzales stops a great counter-attack.

This guy was determined to pick up a caution before halftime and before he got hurt.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/71...anned-life-gambling-derrick-jones-yaw-yeboah/


Behind a paywall; most rehashes what we already knew although this is new:

MLS has worked with jurisdictions that allow betting to remove yellow and red cards as part of betting opportunities. Those efforts have been successful. There are 52 total jurisdictions and, of those, 41 allow betting. Thirty-three of those jurisdictions do not allow cards, and 15 of those changed rules after outreach from the league, an MLS spokesperson said.

I don’t know what they are referring to regarding jurisdictions but thought it was interesting.

 

My guess is states/geographic areas that allow legal sports betting.

 

They know it wasn't a one-time thing. FWIW, dating apps such as FanDuel allow you to bet if certain players will pick up a yellow card in today's Champions League matches.

When the NBA's latest betting scandal with Billups, etc, came up, it was on ESPN for the full 24 hour cycle. MLS players getting suspended didn't get a single second from what I saw since they no longer have the contract for the games.