In the six years since the Supreme Court struck down a law restricting sports betting to Nevada, sports leagues of all sizes and shapes have jumped into gambling. Despite many years of resistance, skilled leagues have taken thousands and thousands of dollars from casinos and bookmakers, who spend huge amounts of cash to attract latest customers. Former no-go zones like Las Vegas are now free for all; The National Football League even hosted the Super Bowl there last month.
Still, in a nod to the zero-tolerance policy they once argued in court, the leagues proceed to say their priority in coping with gaming firms is to protect the integrity of their games. This means penalizing all players and coaches who bet on their sport, and in some cases any sport. It is believed that betting on matches would give them an incentive to influence the consequence in potentially insidious ways, corresponding to scoring points.
However, people close to players and coaches may pose a greater risk to leagues. On Wednesday, there were reports that the translator Shohei Ohtani, a slugger and Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, was fired by the Dodgers after being accused of stealing thousands and thousands of dollars from a player to place bets with an allegedly illegal bookmaker that is under federal investigation.
The details of Ohtani’s situation remain very unclear. However, he and the translator, Ippei Mizuhara, have been close for years, which raises the uncomfortable query of whether Mizuhara could have used confidential knowledge of Ohtani to profit his gambling. Who higher to know if the star had a sore knee or shoulder the day he was supposed to throw the ball?
A Major League Baseball spokesman said the league was still gathering facts in the case.
Robert Williams, executive director of the New York State Gaming Commission, said insider gambling by members of a player’s or team’s entourage will not be only one in every of the biggest threats to the integrity of sporting events, but additionally one in every of the most difficult for police.
“The problem will be if you have a player’s cousin twice removed, or a friend knows something about the player or players being injured, or worse yet, can influence the player’s performance in some way, such as missing a free kick,” Williams said. “I don’t think anyone was confident we’d be able to catch it all.”
Indeed, legal sports betting is exploding, turning the task of tracking suspicious activity right into a game of Whac-a-Mole. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans will legally bet almost $120 billion on sports in 2023. Nearly 25 million more Americans wagered on sports last 12 months than in 2018, according to the group, and the variety of states where sports betting is legal will reach 38 this 12 months.
California is one in every of the players who has no probability of winning, which could also be why Mizuhara would potentially turn to an illegal bookmaker. Either way, Mizuhara is the latest, and undoubtedly not the last, team or league worker to turn into involved in gambling.
Last week, Amit Patel, who worked in the finance department of the Jacksonville Jaguars, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for embezzled over $22 million from the team. Patel used a few of the money to place bets on online gambling sites, in addition to to purchase cryptocurrency, sports memorabilia and a rustic club membership.
The NFL, which has not violated any gambling rules for many years, fined 10 players last season, including seven who received season-long bans for betting on NFL games. However, the league also disciplined greater than a dozen league employees, including two fired in the last two years for violating gambling rules. One former worker said the firing was because he bet lower than $1,000 on the NFL and other sports 4 years earlier through an organization that is now a league partner. The second worker stated that the league’s foremost concern appears to be the possibility of any debts getting used as leverage against the worker.
“We have to educate our staff,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said last month in response to an issue from people wondering whether NFL games had been fixed. “This applies to owners, players, coaches, everyone in the organization, everyone at the league level and our partners. We make sure they understand, while people can speculate, people can have their own observations. We must keep this standard as high as possible. we probably can.
Some experts say professional athletes in the United States are so well paid that they have no incentive to take money to fix competitions. However, inside information useful for players, can still be filtered in other ways
For example, in April 2022, a Professional Fighters League event was pre-recorded and advertised as if it were a live fight. “We had sports books that said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I feel like they’re betting on fights like they know who’s going to win,’” said Matt Holt, founding father of US Integrity, which looks for unusual betting patterns on behalf of sports organizations.
Some bookmakers and state regulators froze betting on the event, but not before suffering significant losses. It was later determined that someone in the league had broken a confidentiality agreement and told others about the fight results. However, no known penalty was issued.
NBA referee Tim Donaghy began serving a 15-month prison sentence in 2008 for his involvement in a betting scheme in which he was paid to pick winners of NBA games and supply players with confidential information.
Sports books have also spoken out against what they see as insider trading. Three days before quarterback Tom Brady announced in March 2022 that he was coming out of retirement and joining the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, several large online bets were placed – starting from $10,000 to $20,000 – for the Buccaneers to win the 2023 Super Bowl after exchange rate up to $20,000. 60 to 1.
The bets were too large to be placed by random people on a hunch that a team with out a clear quarterback would win the NFL title, said Jay Kornegay, vp of SuperBook, a web-based gambling company.
Whether this was true or not, it is evident that the increase in gambling across the country will raise more questions on the boundaries between athletes and those that have close access to them.
“I think it would be crazy to think there won’t be a scandal about trying to influence the outcome of an event,” said Williams, director of the New York Gaming Commission. “There will always be people looking to gain an advantage, whether legal or illegal.”
Rebecca R. Ruiz reporting contributed.
