Through the first half of the nineteenth century gambling on cricket had been endemic — matches were arranged with betting as the primary purpose, and some were fixed to ensure the desired result. By the 1850s the gambling culture had declined sharply under Victorian moral pressure, the rise of professional touring cricket and the growing influence of the MCC, which increasingly discouraged wagering at Lord's. The 1850s were the decade in which cricket gambling moved from mainstream to disreputable.
Cricket's early history is inseparable from gambling; many of the game's formative structures — county matches, the Gentlemen v Players fixture, single-wicket challenges — were devised as vehicles for wagering. Their survival after gambling's decline required a reinvention of cricket as a sport played for its own sake.
Gambling on cricket had been central to the game from at least the 1740s. By the early nineteenth century large sums changed hands on county and representative matches; the most famous gambling fixture — the 1810 Hambledon match — had involved wagers of thousands of pounds. Several early nineteenth-century scandals involved matches arranged specifically for betting purposes with predetermined results. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, Victorian moral opinion was turning against public gambling; the Betting and Loans Act of 1853 made certain forms of gambling illegal and created social pressure against its public display. The MCC, sensitive to its respectability, had discouraged wagering at Lord's from the 1830s onward. The rise of the professional touring sides under Clarke — where the commercial incentive was gate money, not gambling — shifted the financial logic of professional cricket away from betting. By 1860 cricket gambling had not disappeared, but it had become a matter for private clubs and private individuals rather than a public feature of the game. The match-fixing scandals would return in a different form — the 1900s and again in the 2000s — but the Victorian gambling era was effectively over by 1860.
1740s–1810s: Peak era of cricket gambling
1840s: Victorian moral opinion turns against public gambling
1853: Betting and Loans Act restricts public gambling
1850s: MCC discourages wagering at Lord's
1860: Cricket gambling still exists but is no longer a public feature
A gradual but decisive cultural shift that removed gambling as a central feature of cricket's commercial model and enabled the game to develop the respectable Victorian identity it would carry into the twentieth century.
The decline of gambling transformed cricket's commercial model from betting-based to gate-money-based, and with it transformed the social culture of the game. The match-fixing scandals of the 2000s were thus a return to a very old problem in a new guise.
Cricket Canada
12 May 2026
ICC suspended six months of funding to Cricket Canada over governance failures and financial misreporting — 63% of their total revenue.
Multiple franchises
8 May 2026
The IPL's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit (ACSU) submitted a formal report to the BCCI in May 2026 flagging "certain anomalies" observed across the league stage: unauthorised persons had been seen in the team dugout, on the team bus, and at team hotels during IPL matches in apparent breach of anti-corruption Standard Operating Procedures. IPL chairman Arun Dhumal confirmed the report publicly and warned that "very stringent action" would be taken if violations continued. Separately, the BCCI tightened protocols after reports that certain franchise owners had been seen mingling with players in restricted areas — a specific interaction prohibited under the anti-corruption framework.
Various county sides
1865-08-01
Despite MCC's attempts to reduce gambling on cricket through the 1840s and 1850s, county cricket in the 1860s still operated in a culture where betting was widespread and where allegations of arranged results circulated freely among those closest to the game. Several county fixtures of the decade generated suspicion among contemporaries that the outcome had been agreed in advance, though the absence of formal investigation meant that no players were ever charged.