During an affidavit in 2012, a lawyer for the NFL argued that the league was completely opposed to sports betting because “would negatively impact our long-term relationship with our fans and the perception of our sport across the country.”
Currently, he is not so opposed.
For the Super Bowl to be played on Sundayan estimated 31.4 million Americans will legally gamble on $7.6 billionboth figures mark a record and an increase of 35 and 78 percent, respectively, compared to the previous year, according to the American Gaming Association.
During the last year, associations with sports betting companies and casinos accounted for a significant portion of NFL sponsorship revenuewhich reached a record $1.8 billion, with just about every major player involved (including DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, BetMGM and PointsBet).
In addition, a few days ago, the NFL reached its first agreement with a bookmaker in Canada, this in anticipation of the incorporation in April of regulated sports betting in Ontario.
“this changes everything: It’s extremely important in terms of choosing a side on one issue and profiting from the other ten years later,” said Max Bichsel, the vice president of NewYorkBets.com, a sports betting research and analysis company.
For those who may have just started paying attention to sports betting (perhaps because of the commercial blitz during the NFL playoffs and the Olympics, featuring members of the Manning family and other retired athletes); next, a guide to how the NFL changed its mind in just a decade.
How opposed was the NFL?
Much.
For decades, the NFL feared that legalizing gambling could be mixed with match fixing and corruption, which would affect the integrity of this sport. One of the defining scandals in the pre-NFL merger era was the 1963 suspension of two big stars, future Hall of Famers Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions. for gambling on league games and associating with gamblers or “known ruffians”.
That reluctance only intensified in 1992, when then US President George HW Bush signed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) banned sports betting in most statesNevada was the most prominent exemption.
NFL players were prohibited from participating in events held in or sponsored by casinos. Perhaps the best-known example was in 2015, when former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo was not allowed to attend a fantasy football event at a convention center that was part of a Las Vegas casino. .
When did the NFL begin to reconsider its position?
In 2014, the commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver, wrote a text for the Opinion section of The New York Times in which supported efforts to regulate and legalize sports betting. After all, Silver argued, underground sports betting with an estimated $400 billion annual value was already taking place, and times have changed since PASPA was enacted. Lotteries and casinos are everywhere.
The NFL and everyone else took notice.
“This was not a moment of instant change, it was very slow and stablesaid John Holden, a business professor at Oklahoma State University who has written extensively on sports betting. “The NFL saw how the three other leagues made the leap And so the NFL said, ‘Okay.’”
Just as important was the fact that two of the NFL’s most prominent team owners, Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots and Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, were passionate early adopters of DraftKings and fantasy sports. And while the NFL challenged New Jersey’s new sports betting statute in 2012 (a case decided by the Supreme Court), teams signed individual sponsorship deals with betting companieswhich began spending heavily on TV ads during the NFL season.
The Supreme Court makes a decision
Of course, the big change in sports betting came in 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the 1992 law. States that had anticipated the ruling, like New Jersey, had a head start on sports betting. Leagues and teams were still shown more interested in collaborating with businesses related to betting, including casinos and betting apps.
“When the world is changing, you want to take control,” said Oliver Hahl, a Carnegie Mellon University business professor who has studied authenticity and organizational theory in sports.
Ultimately, the NFL and other leagues tried to exert more control by arguing, mainly in US state legislatures, that some tax or fee should be paid to the leagues and not to the betting companies. But nevertheless, leagues have only had limited successsaid Chris Grove, a distinguished professor at the Center for International Gaming Regulation at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a partner emeritus at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, a research and consulting firm.
More than thirty states have authorized sports betting since the Supreme Court decision and California they could be added later this year. Meanwhile, New York, where the NFL is headquartered, has quickly become the nation’s largest sports betting market, outpacing New Jersey, just four weeks after accepting bets via mobile devices. mobiles.
What could happen in the future?
American football is the most popular sport for gamblers and the NFL remains concerned about the integrity of the game. In 2019, the league suspended Josh Shaw, then an injured safety guard for the Arizona Cardinals, for gambling on NFL games. Furthermore, any scandal involving players, coaches or referees on the level of Tim Donaghy, a former NBA referee who went to prison for gambling on games, would be devastating.
the nfl too has been pressured to take action against gambling behavior. It launched a campaign to encourage responsible gambling at the start of the current season, through a $6.2 million partnership with the National Council on Problem Gambling.
Even so, more controls are needed, especially in-game betting, which fuels a gambler’s desire to find bigger, faster betting opportunities, said Keith Miller, a professor at Drake University Law School. On Wednesday, Miller spoke during his participation in a panel on the ethics of legal sports betting organized by the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College.
What the NFL and the country should keep in mind, said Holden, who was also part of the panel, is the experience of the United Kingdom and Europe, where legal sports betting has been more established: both places have witnessed serious problem gambling.
