At 4:30 in the morning, an “Amsterdam” goalkeeper leaves the field to recover a lost ball on the next court. In the next room, separated from the previous one simply by a curtain, another game is played, with other teams. In a while he will also play there, perhaps with another team. There is no emotion or expressiveness on his face, he simply picks up the ball and returns it to his court. We could be looking at a suburban sports center, but there is something liminal and dystopian in mechanical gesturesalmost official, with which this athlete faces the game. Because to begin with, the result is the least important. The important thing is to never stop. The panorama. The collective Bellingcatin collaboration with the football research magazine Josimarpublished on October 21, 2024 a article about 1xBetthe Cyprus-based sportsbook that broadcasts thousands of amateur matches a year live from audience-free gyms in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The analysis detected 1,297 “short football” matches (a variant of indoor football played by teams of between two and five people) in a single 24-hour period in September 2024. It is more than the Bundesliga, the Premier League and LaLiga play together, in a full season. Every year, 1xBet’s figure is around half a million matches. The important thing is to participate. The players change shirts between games: “Barcelona” becomes “Manchester City” half an hour later, and teams with the name of a European club that do not actually exist compete against each other. A Russian football blogger, Viktor Kravchenko, had already denounced in 2021 that these footballers were recruited to play in shifts and that the matches were agreed in advance. Josimar collected the testimony of a young man who received cash for playing from nine in the morning to two in the afternoon, one game after another, for the 1xBet cameras. The other porn. Ismail Vali, then CEO of the analysis firm Yield Sec, explained to Bellingcat why 1xBet remains active a machinery that hardly moves any money: almost no one bets large amounts on a Ukrainian children’s basketball game at three in the morning. These matches serve to keep the user hooked and push them toward products with a higher margin, and we are not just talking about sports bets that, legal or not, yield between 9% and 10%. The casino, however, brings up to 50% profits for the bookmaker. “Crime only invests in more crime,” says Vali, even though legal gambling is not technically a crime. Nothing morbid here, everything normal. Bellingcat traced three of the headquarters to specific locations. One is the Alexander Stepin football school, in the Russian city of Bryansk, which according to the website was active in 2024 (today it is missing), had links with the ruling United Russia party and with Gazprom, the state energy company. In photos published on the web, children posed with weapons in the same facility where the games were recorded. 1,700 kilometers away, in Severodvinsk, Bellingcat identified a party of floorball feminine in which girls of 14 and 15 years old played; There is no way to know if they knew that the match fueled a betting market. In Saransk, the same sports center that hosts matches for 1xBet is also used for weapons training courses. Image: Josimar May your left hand… Meanwhile, 1xBet is listed as a sponsor of two of the biggest clubs in Europe. FC Barcelona renewed its agreement with the betting house until 2029 in July 2024, months before the investigation was published; When consulted by Bellingcat, the club declined to comment. Paris Saint-Germain, sponsored by 1xBet since 2022, went further: in September 2025, almost a year after the report became known, extended the agreement until 2028. …don’t know what the right is doing. In May 2026, online gaming regulatory technology company Gaming Compliance International encrypted the global market of unregulated online betting at $5.9 trillion during 2025, with illegal operators accounting for 78% of the sector’s gross revenue. In the United States, where sports betting is regulated in most states, legal operators managed almost $150 billion in bets during 2024 and generated $13.71 billion in revenue. And it is only a fraction, obviously, of what moves outside of what is legal. Farms are just the surface. In Xataka | Goodbye to Polymarket and Kalshi in Spain: the Government blocks “predictive markets” for not having a gaming license
