Stefan Milicevic Banned for 24 Years After Running a Match-Fixing Network

The longest ban of this tennis season belongs to a player most fans have never watched. Stefan Milicevic, a 29-year-old Serbian whose career peaked at No. 1,338 in the world, has been suspended for 24 years by the International Tennis Integrity Agency for fixing matches and, more seriously in the agency’s eyes, for persuading other players to fix theirs. The ban runs until October 8, 2050. His fine, $70,000, is roughly fourteen times what Tennis Watcher records as his entire career prize money.

What did the ITIA announce on Thursday?

A deemed sanction of unusual size. Milicevic fixed six matches between 2022 and 2024, five of them his own, and attempted to fix six more, the ITIA said, via Sky Sports. On top of that, he was charged with recruiting or attempting to recruit multiple professional players as part of a corrupt network during the same period, resulting in a number of other players fixing matches. While suspended he cannot play in, coach at or attend any event sanctioned by World Tennis, the ATP, the WTA, the Grand Slams or any national association. The same agency ended a career by paperwork from the other direction this week, when Gael Monfils’s Paris farewell was cancelled by his place on the ITIA retired list: one list removes a legend quietly, the other removes a qualifier until he is 53.

Why did recruiting other players change the case?

Because it turned a seller into a supplier. The ITIA confirmed that the length of the ban reflected the seriousness of the anti-corruption offences and the recruitment attempts, and that Milicevic’s refusal to cooperate did not determine it, TennisUpToDate reports. That distinction matters for every lower-tier player reading the ruling. Fixing your own matches is priced as corruption. Building the market for other people’s corruption is priced as organising, and organising is what carries a sanction measured in decades rather than years. The tour’s top end spent the same week on a very different kind of history, as Iga Swiatek completed her set of WTA 1000 semi-finals in Wuhan, and the gap between those two stories is roughly the gap between the tour’s broadcast product and its third tier, where an 11-match player can operate for two years before anyone adds it up.

How can a 24-year ban be imposed without a hearing?

By silence, under the agency’s own rules. The ITIA made seven separate attempts to obtain a response from Milicevic through multiple channels during its 2026 investigation and received none, TennisUpToDate reports. It issued a Notice of Major Offense on September 24. He did not respond to that either, so a deemed sanction under the ITIA’s sanctioning guidelines took effect on October 9, and the case never went before an independent anti-corruption hearing officer. There is no contested ruling to appeal line by line, because there was never a contest. The outcome is a career-ending penalty produced entirely by one side’s evidence and the other side’s absence, which is procedurally tidy and leaves the public record thinner than a case this size would normally leave.

What has the ITIA not said yet?

Almost everything below the headline. The agency did not give details about which matches were fixed, and it did not name any of the other players involved, the Associated Press reports. Those two silences are where the rest of this story lives. If a number of other players fixed matches because Milicevic recruited them, those players are presumably identifiable from the same investigation, and their cases have yet to surface. One thread is already visible: Marino Jakic, Milicevic’s playing partner at an ITF event in Osijek in August 2023, has been provisionally suspended since June 24 while the ITIA investigates potential breaches in 2023, TennisUpToDate reports. A provisional suspension is not a finding, and Jakic’s appeal against it was turned down in August on the basis that substantial evidence supported it. Cases at this level of the sport rarely arrive with crowds attached; the week’s other tennis discipline-adjacent story, Karolina Muchova winning her first ten tiebreaks of the century, shows how much cleaner the sport’s oddities look when nobody is selling them.

What happens next?

More names, most likely. An investigation that ends with its organiser banned for 24 years and its recruits unnamed is an investigation with announcements still to make, and the ITIA has said its work on the network continues. Milicevic himself has a theoretical route back through appeal, but a player who answered none of seven approaches and one formal notice has shown no sign of wanting a hearing he could have had for free. His playing record stays where it stopped: 11 professional matches across the period in question, a career high of No. 1,338 reached at 17, and a place in the record books he never came close to reaching with a racquet, on the same autumn calendar as Ben Shelton’s birthday win in Shanghai. The court in the file photo for this story is empty. For Milicevic, every sanctioned court now is, until 2050.