According to Europol, the financial impact of Covid on football clubs has caused an increase in match-fixing cases.
Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, and Uefa are working together to tackle match-fixing in football.
The first Europol-Uefa conference on match-fixing was held on Tuesday.
Organised crime quickly understood that a lot of football clubs were suffering financially as a result of Covid-19.
The head of Europol's European financial and economic crime centre said that players, coaches, officials and even club executives are vulnerable to being corrupted by fixers.
With the huge profits associated with making the unpredictable predictable, we are seeing more and more cases of match-fixing and suspicious results.
The conference was held at the headquarters of Europol in the Netherlands, with officials from law enforcement, judicial authorities and national football associations from 49 countries attending.
Co-operation between law enforcement and sports organizations is vital to detect and investigate suspected corruption in football, and to stop fraudulent activities before they can even begin.
Sportradar, a company which detects unusual betting patterns, released a report in October saying it had detected more than 1,100 suspicious sports matches since the start of the pandemic in April 2020.
The first joint Europol-Uefa international conference is an important step forward in the fight against match-fixing, and sends out a strong signal that both organisation are here to pool their forces and do their utmost to minimize this phenomenon.
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