Legalized Sports Betting Is A Losing Proposition For Teams And Fans

Leagues that don’t play their cards right or become reckless rolling the dice risk losing everything if the integrity of games is undermined.

As someone whose parents nearly split over gambling losses, I can’t help but be alarmed by the way legalized betting is taking over professional and collegiate sports. In just a few short years, leagues across the sports spectrum have cavalierly tossed aside time-honored, well-founded concerns about threats to the integrity of games and well-being of fans to ride the tidal wave of cash flooding into their coffers via casinos and mobile apps—all with the blessing of participating state governments, which shamefully sold out the public’s best interests for a piece of the action.

I take this issue very personally. I was only nine when I lost my dad (at 50) to a heart attack, but I still clearly recall the heated arguments with my mother about his (mostly losing) bets, mostly on baseball, leaving money in short supply for far worthier causes. My father—a hard-working kosher butcher who always made time for me—wasn’t a bad dad. But he was a bad gambler, and I can only imagine how much worse off we would’ve been had he been able to place bets on mobile apps via a device in his pocket rather than having to seek out illegal bookies.

But beyond facilitating the spread of gambling addiction, sports betting presents a much more fundamental threat—the destruction of public faith in the legitimacy of athletic contests and the performance of individual players.

Sports leagues used to consider the slightest association with gambling strictly off limits. Back in 1979, Willie Mays—my favorite baseball player of all time and fresh off his induction into the Hall of Fame—was forced to give up his job as roving hitting instructor for the New York Mets and banned from working for any other major league team because he had agreed to serve as a “goodwill ambassador” for Bally’s Park Place Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.

Even though Willie’s gig was simply to hobnob at corporate and charity events with Bally’s biggest customers, and despite New Jersey law prohibiting gambling on sports, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn insisted that baseball must be totally isolated from such riffraff. “A casino is no place for a baseball hero and Hall of Famer,” he said when exiling the Say Hey Kid, excommunicating former Yankee great Mickey Mantle four years later for taking a similarly benign casino job.

It wasn’t until 1985 that a new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, lifted the ban on “two of the most beloved and admired athletes in the country today,” insisting the duo “belong in baseball.” The reinstatement was featured on a Sports Illustrated cover under the headline, “Welcome Home!” However, Commissioner Ueberroth made it clear that Mays and Mantle were rare exceptions to the prevailing rule in baseball prohibiting active players, coaches, and team employees from associating with gambling enterprises. The same policy applied in all professional and collegiate sports.

In retrospect, while I felt bad for Willie and Mickey at the time, I can certainly appreciate why baseball was so sensitive to the threat of corruption by gamblers, given the notorious “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, when multiple players took bribes to fix the World Series (dramatized in the 1988 film, “Eight Men Out”).  If people suspect outcomes are rigged or that players are sharing inside information with betters, the game is literally over. It’s why Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti banned all-time hit leader Pete Rose for life in 1989 for betting on his team’s games as manager.

Boy, have times changed!!! While no league tolerates betting by players or coaches on their own sport, nearly all have enthusiastically embraced legalized gambling enterprises as partners in crime, recklessly raising the odds of sullying their core business, while callously accelerating and cashing in on the spread of gambling addiction nationwide.

Court decision prompts 180-degree turn

We can thank the U.S. Supreme Court for this dramatic transformation with its 2018 ruling overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, a 1992 federal law prohibiting sports betting in nearly all states. Among the law’s sponsors was U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, New Jersey Democrat and two-time National Basketball Association champion with the New York Knicks, who said the act was needed to safeguard the integrity of sports and keep addiction to gambling from becoming an epidemic. 

Just six months after that Supreme Court ruling, Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that MGM Resorts would become Major League Baseball’s first “official gaming partner.” As reported by NBC Sports, “MGM began to advertise its many casinos and resorts on MLB Network, MLB.com, the MLB At Bat app and the like. MGM, in turn, was given access to MLB’s official statistics for its online and casino-based sports books. That included ‘enhanced statistics’ given to MGM on an exclusive basis. It was like the league and one of the world’s biggest gambling outfits were working together, hand-in-hand.”

While all the other sports leagues have since been seduced by the financial windfall provided by legalized gambling, football is the most hypocritical offender. The New York Post reported that in 2003, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell was so vehemently opposed to any association with gambling that he wouldn’t even allow the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to place a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl broadcast. In 2006, protesting New Jersey’s attempt to legalize sports betting, he said: “It’s a very strongly held view in the NFL, it has been for decades, that the threat that gambling could occur in the NFL or fixing of games or that any outcome could be influenced by the outside could be very damaging to the NFL and very difficult to ever recover from.” 

As recently as 2017, Goodell said: “We still strongly oppose legalized sports gambling. The integrity of our game is No. 1. We will not compromise on that.” Yet today, the NFL generates nearly $2 billion in added  revenue from gambling-related sponsorships, according to CNBC. The 2024 Super Bowl was held in Las Vegas of all places (after authorizing the gypsy Raiders’ move to Sin City), while the NFL has even allowed a sport betting center to open inside the stadium of the Washington Commanders.

If money talks, gambling money shouts, drowning out any objections. Overall revenue from legal sports betting in the U.S. soared by 45% in 2023 to a record of nearly $11 billion, according to the American Gaming Association, thanks to the growing number of states legalizing sports betting (up to 38) and the explosion of gambling apps on mobile devices. Legal gambling enterprises handled nearly $120 billion in bets last year (up 28%), with “the house” retaining a record 9% of the total.

So much for concerns over integrity!

The negative fallout has already begun

Defenders of legalized sports betting say it’s better to have gambling out in the open, where it can be more effectively regulated and taxed to generate badly needed revenue supporting public services. But I think the potential risks to sports leagues and society at large far outweigh any possible benefits. We’re already seeing disturbing implications emerge:

·        There have been reports of increasing verbal abuse by fans at arenas, upset at players and coaches for ruining their “prop” bets—wagers on individual outcomes within games by teams or players, rather than bets on winning or losing the game.

·        Last month, for the first time in 70 years, an NBA player was banned for life after allegedly betting on games and giving inside dope to gamblers. Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors was accused of tipping betters off about injuries (which could influence the outcome of games) and faking injuries to remove himself from games to control prop bets on his own performance.

·        The NFL suspended wide receiver Calvin Ridley for a year for betting on league games in 2022, and three other players were suspended not long afterwards.

Baseball had a colossally close call this season when the translator for Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers confessed to stealing millions from the player without his knowledge to cover gambling debts for online bets (still illegal in California) on sports (reportedly other than baseball).

Even if players or coaches aren’t caught red-handed wagering on games or altering their own play to win bets, the whispers are already starting. Is it any wonder many can’t believe Ohtani didn’t realize he was being fleeced for so much cash, speculating he must’ve either been aware of the payoff to bookies to cover his friend’s debts—or worse, had the translator betting on his behalf, perhaps on baseball as well as other sports. That appears to be a false narrative, but in this age of widespread conspiracy theories and fake news spread virally via social media, can sports leagues afford to take a chance of such rumors destroying the reputation of their teams and players?

How long will it be before fans and the press start questioning every negative development in a game, believing the worst? Did a key player really hurt his ankle and have to leave the game early, or did prop bets determine his removal? Did a shortstop just happen to make a critical error on a seemingly routine play to lose a game? Did a wide-open receiver intentionally drop a touchdown pass that would’ve cleared the point spread? Did a 90 percent foul shooter miss one to lock down a wager?

Defenders of legalized gambling dismiss such speculation as nonsense, insisting that today’s players are paid far too much to risk their careers on a bet. But I say there are plenty of fringe players who might be tempted to play along with gamblers if the payoff is right (especially if they are deep in the hole as betters themselves).

Must I also remind everyone that gambling behavior isn’t rational? If most people were by nature too responsible and disciplined to risk losing money needed to pay for rent or food to win a bet, gambling addiction wouldn’t be an issue. The fact is that gamblers, especially when desperate to recoup past losses, can make crazy, self-destructive bets regardless of the potential consequences.

And what of collegiate sports, where players aren’t paid outside of their scholarships (except for a lucky few who can command commercial sponsorships or count on a pro career to cash in on all their talent, hard work, and physical pain)? A collegiate betting scandal in Iowa could be the tip of the iceberg unless more states follow the lead of Louisiana, which is banning licensed sports books from offering prop bets on college athletes.

And what of the financial and psychological impact on fans? League officials used to at least pretend to care about the welfare of their customers in terms of gambling. Making legal sports betting so widely accessible over mobile devices is likely to entice many more people to gamble than if they had to break the law and find a bookie to take their action and risk getting arrested.

The same goes for flooding the airwaves and covering stadiums with ads for legalized betting, having sports books on site, and constantly discussing odds of various betting scenarios during game broadcasts. This marketing barrage will undoubtedly normalize gambling not only for today’s betters but indoctrinate generations of young fans as well. Betting is like taking crack for gambling addicts, and sports leagues appear perfectly willing to serve as pushers if the payoff is right.  

The leagues are aware of this risk to fans. The New York Post reported that in 2009, NFL Commissioner Goodell wrote that if Delaware legalized betting on football, “it will be in Delaware’s interest to create ever larger numbers of new gamblers as the state attempts to maximize any revenue found in this promotion. The negative social impact of additional gambling cannot be minimized in a community.” 

So much for worrying about the “negative social impact” of gambling on fans!

What can be done at this point?

Unfortunately, now that Pandora’s box has been opened, I don’t expect sports leagues to do anything that might slow or reverse the exponential growth of betting revenue, regardless of the risks to the integrity of games or the financial solvency of fans who gamble away money they can’t afford to lose. The same goes for state and local governments, which collected $14.4 billion in taxes last year off the winners of legal betting, after already fleecing the public via lotteries for years and tripping over one another to approve new casino licenses.

I’m afraid the only way to stop the mad rush into legal sports betting is for major scandals to devastate professional and/or amateur sports. I wish it didn’t have to come to that, but I believe a nuclear event is what it will ultimately take to scare league officials straight.

A huge scandal, or even a series of smaller yet significant events that appear to be trending, might force sports leagues to see the bigger picture rather than be blinded by how much money they make getting into bed with legal bookies. Only then may they realize the near-term windfall isn’t worth the long-term, perhaps irreparable damage being done to the fundamental value of their product—the integrity of players and outcome of games.

In gambling, remember that the house always wins. If sports leagues don’t play their cards right or become reckless rolling the dice, they risk losing everything.