is scored almost four times higher than any other sport in the number of sporting events with suspicious alerts flagged by ESSA last year.

The body which represents sports-betting operators reported that tennis accounted for 73 out of 100 alerts, with football coming in second with 19 alerts, followed by table tennis, ice hockey, snooker and greyhound racing, producing two alerts each.

The fourth quarter produced more alerts overall than any other, with its 35 alerts comfortably beating the 24, 23 and 18 alerts respectively seen in the other three quarters.

ESSA’s report comes after tennis was involved in two recent betting-related incidents.

A joint investigation by BBC and BuzzFeed News identified 15 players that were alleged to have lost heavy-betting matches often.

This was followed by a revelation by the Guardian that a number of tennis umpires had been secretly banned or suspended for manipulating a data system after taking bribes from betting syndicates to delay the inputting of scores.

ESSA said that suspicious betting on football predominantly occurred in Europe last year, with European matches making up 68% of the football total, though the suspicious tennis betting was more even, with Asia leading the way with 19 matches, ahead of Europe with 18 matches.

Turkey was the country where the most suspicious alerts occurred with a total of 10 matches – eight for tennis (more than any other country) and two for football.