Six men dressed in shorts walk across a small football field. They have little interest in the game they are playing: they do not compete for balls, do not run or celebrate goals. There is no referee or spectators. They are part of the world of amateur matches that 1xBet, the official betting house of Fútbol Club Barcelona, broadcasts to its customers 24 hours a day for them to bet on.
An environmental survey Cat Belling revealed that 1xBet recently allowed betting on at least one of these amateur matches played by Russian minors. The youngest player identified was 14 years old. It has also been established that these matches, the location of which is secret, are played in stadiums in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, sometimes in facilities belonging to children’s schools.
Last July, 1xBet, whose head office is in Cyprus, renewed its sponsorship until 2029 with Barça, of which it is a global partner and official betting partner. Contacted by this newspaper, the Catalan club did not wish to make any comment or reveal the amount of the agreement. However, it is estimated that the club obtains between 9 and 12 million euros annually for this agreement.
The revelations of Cat Belling They add to a controversial past. In 2019, Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham broke their deal with the company after an investigation by the Sunday hours discovered that 1xBet offered in other jurisdictions the possibility of betting on cockfights and matches with minors. The company had also promoted an erotic casino with dealers in high minus.
The three founders of 1xBet, of Russian origin, have an international arrest warrant issued in 2020 by their country, where the company is prohibited from operating for illegal gambling activities. At the same time, the company is on Ukraine’s sanctions list due to its ties to Russia, even though some of the facilities where these amateur matches are held are a few kilometers from kyiv.
1xBet was founded in 2007 as a digital casino and only in 2014 entered the sports betting market. The company, which did not respond to this media’s request for comment, offers its services in a large number of countries through licenses granted to subsidiaries.
The company works in many countries, including Spain, thanks to licenses granted to its subsidiaries. One of them declared bankruptcy in November 2021 in the Netherlands after failing to pay its customers’ bets. In Morocco, 1xBet was criminally denounced by the national gaming authority of this country for illegal activity. In the United Kingdom, its exploitation is prohibited.
The long list of controversies does not seem to be an obstacle for this company to continue sponsoring major football clubs. Besides Barça, 1xBet is also an official sponsor of Paris Saint-Germain and the Italian Serie A.
1,300 games per day
1xBet calls this type of amateur football “short football” in which teams of two, three, four and up to five players play in matches lasting between 10 and 12 minutes. On several occasions, the same player is seen playing on different teams and in different modalities.
The flow of matches – which you cannot see from Spain – is constant. In just 24 hours, nearly 1,300 matches of this type of football are played, a sport that has been reproduced on a large scale in other sports: from basketball to volleyball to ice hockey, tennis and ping-pong.
The shadow of fixing in these matches is long. Although it was not possible to demonstrate documentary evidence, former players denounced on the networks that certain results were agreed. One of the companies that distributes this content for 1xBet specifies that players are “regularly” subjected to polygraph tests to prevent any type of cheating.
Visitors to the 1xBet website are estimated to be around five million per month according to SimilarWeb, a page that analyzes web page traffic. The scope of this endeavor is much greater, however, since in other jurisdictions so-called mirror pages are available: exact replicas hosted on other domains to avoid blocking.
A good portion of these live videos offered by 1xBet are offered by third parties. One of them, registered in Cyprus, boasts of offering up to 15,000 amateur events per month due to the increase in “compulsive punters”. Another company boasts of offering broadcasts from “anywhere in the world,” including “school grounds.”
It is precisely on the field of a children’s football school in the western Russian city of Bryansk that many of these matches take place, as determined. Cat Belling geolocate broadcast images.
This is the Alexander Stepin football school, which, according to its website, is associated with United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin, and with Gazprom, the Russian energy supplier sanctioned by the community authorities.
In some photos posted on social media by this children’s academy, children are shown examining military equipment and posing with rifles in the same stadiums where 1xBet matches are broadcast.
On certain occasions, the incessant rhythm of “short football” and the world of children come together, as happened one September afternoon during a live broadcast on 1xBet: a few minutes after the At the end of one of these matches, we could see a little boy invading the field. and play with the footballers.
