Determinants of Betting Behaviour Among Professional Football Players: Evidence from Administrative Data

Research on athlete gambling is chronically constrained by the under-reporting biases inherent in self-reported surveys. This paper overcomes this limitation by leveraging a unique, population-level administrative dataset arising from the largest single-jurisdiction enforcement action against player betting in football history. In 2025, the Turkish Football Federation sanctioned over a thousand professional players based on actual bookmaker records. We estimate the joint distribution of betting incidence and intensity across the entire four-tier professional pyramid. Using a probit model, we find that betting incidence is driven by structural financial incentives. The sanction rate rises steeply from 3.4 percent in the top division to 29.4 percent in the lowest tier. The probability of receiving a maximum ban follows an inverted-U profile peaking at age 33.4, reflecting an evolving calculus of opportunity costs and diminishing marginal financial need. These findings provide the first objective administrative evidence of player gambling trajectories and demonstrate that the tier gradient driving administrative betting violations identifies the precise population most structurally exposed to match-fixing recruitment.