The algorithm is mightier than the racquet.

The joint BBC-BuzzFeed News investigation claims to have uncovered evidence of widespread corruption at the top level of world tennis.

Sixteen players ranked in the top 50 over the past decade were repeatedly flagged to the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) over suspicions they have thrown matches, according to the BBC.

The report, which does not identify any current players, claims 16 players, including more than one grand slam champion, has been investigated by the TIU over suspicions of match fixing.

It all began with a piece of coding and a dataset.

The BuzzFeed News report titled “Tennis Racket” included a GitHub link explaining the research and data sourcing that contributed to its bombshell report.

The 12-month investigation began with designing an algorithm that would identify suspicious betting patterns in relation to players inexplicably underperforming.

The methodology report says the news site consulted with Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Severini, a professor of statistics at Northwestern University in helping develop the algorithm and analyse the data.

“That analysis revealed many examples of one particularly suspicious pattern: heavy betting against a player, followed by that player’s loss,” the BuzzFeed News GiftHub page states.

The explainer details how the betting activity for more than 26,000 ATP and grand slam matches between 2009 and September 2015 were analysed for suspicious patterns across seven different bookmakers.

“BuzzFeed News prepared a dataset that contained one row for each bookmaker for each match,” the report said.

“We then used the odds to calculate the implied chances that each player would win.

“The calculation is straightforward — opponent odds / (opponent odds + player odds) — and accounts for the house’s cut.

“To calculate the ‘odds movement’ for a bookmaker in a given match, BuzzFeed News looked at the difference between each player’s chance of winning (see above) implied by the opening and final odds.

“For example, if the opening odds suggested Player A had a 65% chance of winning, but the final odds suggested a 50% chance of winning, the ‘odds movement’ is 15 percentage points.

“BuzzFeed News then selected only matches where, in at least one book, the odds moved more than 10 percentage points. (This phenomenon occurred in about 11% of all matches.)

“We selected the 10-percentage-point cut-off based on discussions with sports-betting investigators, who said that movement above this threshold was what prompted them to give greater scrutiny to a match.

“We then selected players who had lost more than 10 such ‘high-movement’ matches. Thirty-nine players met this criterion.”

Matches in which those 39 players had “high movement” in betting activity were then analysed through a series of simulations designed to estimate the likelihood of the player losing the match when a “high” degree of movement has occurred in betting.

The raw numbers were then analysed for statistical significance through a Bonferroni correction (to take the impact of multiple comparisons into account).

The co-author of the BuzzFeed News report, John Templon has further explained the data-sourcing that fed the algorithm, highlighting several suspicious cases.

“For one player, I identified 16 matches for which bookmakers revised his odds of winning downward by at least 10 percentage points he said.

“He lost 15 of the 16 matches, including some in which he started as a heavy favourite.

“It’s extremely unlikely for a player to underperform repeatedly in matches on which people just happen to be betting massive sums against him.”

At when the numbers came out the other side, tennis’ dark secret had been exposed.