As part of the agreement, investigators from Victoria's Sporting Integrity Intelligence Unit will receive real-time alerts from the European Sports Security Association when suspicious betting activity occurs.

Acting Assistant Commissioner Peter Brigham said live betting data was vital to ensuring detectives could start sports corruption investigations as soon as possible.

"We often refer to Melbourne as Australia's sporting capital. However, with that title comes a level of risk in relation to sports betting," Mr Brigham said.

"It is a massive business and in such a lucrative market there is always the potential for corruption.

"If this is not detected, it's not reported. Sports corruption is in many ways a clandestine activity."

The agreement signed late last year was announced on Monday.

The 2016 Australian Open was mired in controversy after an overseas media report that world tennis authorities had covered up corruption issues.

It then emerged that Victoria Police was approaching local figures about match fixing at the Open. A suspicious mixed doubles encounter was later exposed.

Shortly before last year's tournament, it was revealed that reigning boys champion Oliver Anderson had been charged with match fixing, sparking another round of indignation and despair from the world's best players..

In the Anderson case, police were able to interview the player at the venue, where he made full confessions, partly because they received timely information about betting patterns.

The European association is a not-for-profit organisation whose members include many of the largest private betting companies in the world.

Under the agreement, the association will provide police with information about suspicious betting patterns on any sporting encounter in Australia, a system already in place for major Australian bookmakers.

Previously, police had to rely on the association to pass the information to the governing body of a sport, which then passed it on to them; a process that, even if it was completed, was not always timely.

"This agreement [helps] create an environment that will make it difficult for organised crime to infiltrate our shores and our sporting codes," Mr Brigham said.

Victoria Police has charged people with sports corruption offences relating to soccer, harness racing and tennis.

Mr Brigham said the arrests had disrupted fixing syndicates and deterred other athletes from being corrupted.

"For young players, the consequences can be career-destroying," he said.

But the Victorian unit's success has been tempered by difficulty in exposing the organised criminals believed to be driving much of the corruption.

The international aspect of match fixing meant it was complex to investigate, Mr Brigham said.

Criminal prosecutions - and disciplinary proceedings by sporting bodies -cannot rely solely on betting data. But it is considered vital in determining which matches could be fixed, and pointing authorities towards those who could be linked through betting account data.

Those links can, in turn, reveal a relationship with the player or players in question.

In 2016, the European Sports Security Association, sent 130 alerts of suspicious activity, but it is unclear how many of these resulted in people being prosecuted.