Banned Until 2050: The 24-Year Ban That Exposed Tennis’s Match-Fixing Underworld

Twenty-four years. Seventy thousand dollars. Banned until October 2050.

That’s the sentence the International Tennis Integrity Agency handed down this week to Serbian player Stefan Milicevic — and it’s one of the longest punishments in the history of the sport. He’ll be 53 years old before he’s allowed to set foot at a professional tennis event again. Not as a player. Not as a coach. Not even as a spectator.

Milicevic didn’t just fix matches. He built a network.

Who is Stefan Milicevic?

You’ve never heard of him, and that’s the point. Milicevic peaked at world No. 1,338 back in 2014. He played U.S. college tennis at the University of Minnesota, later coached at DePaul University in Chicago, and ground out a living on the fringes of the pro circuit — the Futures and Challenger events where the crowds are thin and the paychecks are thinner.

At 29, with no realistic path to the top of the sport, he made a different career choice. According to the ITIA, between 2022 and 2024, Milicevic fixed six matches — five of them his own — and attempted to fix six more. Worse, he recruited other professional players into what the agency describes as a corrupt network, with the investigation finding that his recruiting led to additional players fixing matches.

Then, when the ITIA came calling, he ghosted them. Seven separate contact attempts through multiple channels. A formal notice of the charges. Silence every time.

That silence is what turned a long ban into a historic one.

Why 24 years? Because he wouldn’t answer the door

Tennis’s anti-corruption rules have a mechanism for exactly this situation: the deemed sanction. If a player refuses to engage with an investigation or contest the charges, the ITIA can impose the maximum penalty without a hearing. Milicevic had seven chances to tell his side. He took none of them — and the clock on 2050 started running.

The agency reserves its harshest punishments for network offenses. In the ITIA’s own sanctioning guidelines, recruiting or leading others into corruption sits in the highest culpability category — above fixing your own matches — because it multiplies the damage across the sport. One corrupt player is a crime. A recruiter is an epidemic.

That’s the pattern in every recent mega-ban. France’s Quentin Folliot got 20 years and a $70,000 fine for 27 breaches as the “central figure” of a syndicate — and had to hand back $44,000 in corrupt payments. Colombia’s Carlos Andrés Sepúlveda Navarro drew 31 years for 83 offenses. Argentina’s Agustin Moyano got 15 years. The message is consistent: fix alone and you’re punished; recruit and you’re erased.

Why it always happens down there

Here’s the uncomfortable economics behind every one of these cases. Folliot, the French syndicate’s central figure, had $60,047 in official career earnings. Total. After years as a professional tennis player.

That’s the hunting ground. At the Futures level, losing in the first round might pay a few hundred dollars — before travel, hotels, coaching, and stringing. A player ranked No. 800 can be one of the thousand best in the world at what they do and still lose money doing it. Then someone offers a few thousand dollars to drop a set, and the math gets very simple, very fast.

The fixers know this. They don’t approach top-50 players with entourages and agents. They approach the 22-year-old ranked No. 900 who’s deciding whether he can afford the flight to the next tournament. Milicevic himself lived in that world — which is exactly why he was such an effective recruiter. He spoke the language. He knew the pressure.

This doesn’t excuse it. But if you want to understand why tennis’s integrity problem lives at the bottom of the rankings instead of the top, follow the money — or rather, the absence of it.

The crackdown is accelerating

Zoom out and the Milicevic ban looks less like an outlier and more like a campaign. In the last two years, the ITIA has:

• Banned Folliot for 20 years as a syndicate ringleader
• Handed Sepúlveda Navarro 31 years across 83 offenses
• Suspended five French players tied to a Belgian match-fixing ring whose leader got a five-year prison sentence in criminal court
• Issued more than 25 lifetime bans historically, going back to Daniel Köllerer’s in 2011

The agency is also getting better at the detection side — suspicious betting patterns, often flagged by bookmakers themselves, now trigger investigations faster than ever. And the deemed-sanction rule means stonewalling no longer buys time; it buys the maximum.

Tennis is learning what cycling learned a generation ago: the only thing that deters systematic cheating is systematic punishment, handed down in public.

What it means for the rest of us

For fans, cases like this are a gut punch — every fixed match at a Futures event in front of 40 people still poisons the idea that what you’re watching is real. But there’s a perverse reassurance in the severity: a sport that bans a nobody for 24 years is a sport that takes integrity seriously. The cover-up would be worse than the crime.

For junior players and parents, the lesson is sharper. The approach doesn’t come with a trench coat and a briefcase of cash. It comes as a friendly older player, maybe a former college teammate, who knows exactly how tight money is and offers “an easy way to cover your travel this month.” The ITIA runs education programs precisely because the first approach is the moment that matters. If your kid is playing competitive junior or college tennis, the conversation about match-fixing belongs alongside the conversation about technique.

And for the rest of us who just love the game? Play it clean, play it loud. The best answer to the underworld is an overworld that keeps growing — more players, more courts, more Saturday morning matches that nobody would ever think to fix.

Play more tennis

That’s what we’re here for. Big Tennis is everything tennis in one big destination — news, drills, strategy, and the history of the sport: bigtennis.com

Looking for a court? TennisMatch.io helps you find your perfect court — search, compare, and book tennis facilities near you: tennismatch.io

Running a club? RunMyCourts.com handles court booking, members, dues, and payments in one place — free to start: runmycourts.com

The bottom line: Stefan Milicevic will be 53 before tennis lets him back in. He fixed matches, recruited others to fix, and then refused to answer for any of it. The 24-year ban isn’t just punishment — it’s a billboard aimed at every player ranked No. 900 who’s doing the math this week. The sport is watching. Play it straight.

Sources: ITIA, EssentiallySports, Tennis365, Front Office Sports.