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Tennis authorities believe that gambling syndicates may attempt to fix matches at Wimbledon, the official in charge of the tournament admitted yesterday.

Speaking after it emerged that eight previous matches at Wimbledon are to be investigated because of suspicious betting activity, Ian Ritchie, chief executive of the All England Club, said that the tournament was alert to the risks of criminal elements trying to manipulate results but that it had the situation under control. He said: “While we are taking it seriously as a potential threat, we currently don't believe it is a serious one for this year's Wimbledon.”

A four-month review, published last month by the International Tennis Federation, the ATP, the WTA Tour and the four grand slams, concluded that while “professional tennis is neither systematically nor institutionally corrupt”, steps needed to be taken to protect “vulnerable” players from corrupt approaches.

The authors of the report, Ben Gunn and Jeff Rees, both former senior policemen, identified 45 professional tennis matches played over the past five years that had “unusual betting patterns” that raised the possibility that players may have been bribed to throw matches. There had been more than 100,000 matches played during that time.

The sport's authorities now hope to appoint someone this summer to lead an integrity unit to focus on prevention and detection of illegal approaches to players. Mr Ritchie said: “We will be shortly appointing somebody to head up this unit. Whilst we set this up to respond to this issue, I do not think we feel that tennis has a problem in this regard.

“The two retired police officers who carried out this report made it very clear that tennis did not have a serious problem.” He said that the report was looking into betting practice, adding: “It is a heck of a jump to say that it is match-fixing. I think there has been a lot of speculation, none of it is hard evidence. Certainly there is no hard evidence about Wimbledon this year - we have not even started yet.”

The potential of cashing in on match-fixing has grown in recent years with the development of betting websites that allow customers to “lay”, or bet against, players winning matches, as well as gambling in the traditional sense by backing a player to win.

Given the vast sums at stake, there are fears that players could be offered far greater rewards to throw a game than they would gain by advancing in the tournament. Gilles Elseneer, a Belgian, said last year that he turned down a £70,000 “bung” to lose in the first round at Wimbledon. A player would need to advance to the quarter-finals before earning that much from the tournament.

The latest review of the sport was prompted by Betfair, the internet betting exchange, which declared void £3.4 million of bets last August on a match between Martín Vassallo Argüello, a low-ranked Argentinian, and Nikolay Davydenko, a player ranked No4 in the world. Despite Davydenko winning the first set easily, he was not favourite to win and eventually withdrew. The inquiry into the match is ongoing. Both players deny wrongdoing.

Mr Ritchie said: “Betfair is a particular type of betting. We have never seen any views or information from the more mainstream betting companies that say there is an issue for them.”

Betfair said that the company had a memorandum of understanding with the tennis boards that encouraged a flow of information. “If they, or we, have any concerns about betting on tennis matches on our site, then we will liaise,” the spokesman said. “It's very much a two-way system. Suspicious matches usually will trade between six and seven figures worth of bets and as the tournament hasn't started it is too early to consider any Wimbledon matches so far. Nothing has been flagged up as suspicious.”

Martina Navratilova, who won nine Wimbledon singles' titles, yesterday called for players found to be involved in match-fixing to be banned for life. Speaking on BBC One's Andrew Marr show, she said: “I think the only way to really deal with it would be to make extremely severe penalties.”