The Devil’s Bargain of Sports Betting

After a 2018 Supreme Court decision kicked off a wave of legalization across America, gambling has become an integral part of how fans consume sports and how leagues make money. But with high-profile athletes caught up in betting scandals, a windfall welcomed by the sports industry also poses serious risks. Leagues now have to walk the line of advertising the next bet while banning athletes who gamble.

On this episode of Radio Atlantic, the sports journalist and Atlantic contributor Jemele Hill joins guest host Adam Harris to discuss the mess that sports betting may create.

Hill fears that “a lot of the worst-case scenarios are happening behind closed doors that we haven’t quite seen yet … Once you start focusing on it, you’re gonna find the culprits. And that’s just gonna make it look like it’s a widespread, uncontrollable problem.”

And while athlete scandals get attention, the deeper problem posed by sports betting is for the fans themselves. Gambling is sold as a harmless way to enjoy sports, but Hill compares it to the tobacco industry, especially in relation to young people. “I think, much like with tobacco, we’re going to look up five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever time period, and it’s going to be a real public-health crisis.”

Listen to the conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: There was a time, not too long ago, when you could turn on the TV and watch sports without ever thinking about gambling. But now it feels impossible to escape.

Harris: In 2018, a Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to sports betting. It’s now legal in three out of every four states. Last year, Americans placed nearly $120 billion in legal sports bets. And earlier this year, the Super Bowl was held within view of the Las Vegas strip.

[Music]

Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week: sports and gambling.

The two industries have rapidly become tied together in a way they’ve never been before in America. And we’re still scrambling to understand what that means for both fans and athletes. Sports leagues of course are always trying to make more money, but what they don’t want are headlines about the ills of gambling addiction, and they especially don’t want people thinking that bets are affecting how athletes themselves perform.

2024 is likely to be another record year in sports gambling, with betting expanding further into college sports and with the first in-person Summer Olympic Games since that Supreme Court decision.

To help us predict where things go from here and what impact gambling may have, I’m joined by sports reporter and Atlantic contributing writer Jemele Hill.

Hey, Jemele. How’s it going?

Jemele Hill: It’s going good. Thanks for having me.

Harris: Absolutely. So I mentioned athletes. At the same time that leagues are embracing gambling, they have to police players. This year has seen a number of betting scandals, none bigger than the one surrounding the highest-paid athlete in the world: Shohei Ohtani.

Harris: Shohei Ohtani is the biggest star in baseball. He has the biggest contract in history. Throughout the winter, people thought that was going to be the story, but his name over the last couple of months has been in the news mostly for a betting scandal. So for folks who haven’t followed it, can you sort of take us through the last nine months or so?

Hill: I mean, it was certainly not the scandal that Major League Baseball ever wants associated with someone who many people consider already to be sort of the face of the league.

Shohei Ohtani, especially moving to the Los Angeles market—I mean, it’s a really crowning achievement for a sport that sometimes has struggled to mainstream some of its bigger stars.

So essentially what happened is his interpreter was linked with an illegal gambling ring. From the looks of it, I think when it first got reported, it was easy to make the leap, like, Okay, what was Shohei Ohtani’s involvement? But it turns out that he was the victim of what was a massive fraud by his interpreter. And the interpreter basically bilked him for millions, which he used to fund his gambling addiction.

This was just such an unsavory look for Major League Baseball. Anybody who’s followed the sport knows that sort of the legacy of gambling, and what it has meant in that sport has been especially damning—from Pete Rose, who is still not in the Hall of Fame because of his ties to illegal gambling; of course, everybody knows about the infamous Black Sox team. So there’s, you know, a history there—not that it’s happened frequently, but when it has happened, it’s certainly been worth the money, so to speak.

And so everybody, of course, was wondering: What was Shohei Ohtani’s role? Was he involved? Was the interpreter really placing bets for him? And none of that, from what we know from any of the evidence, ever has suggested that Shohei Ohtani was placing any bets whatsoever. He was just the victim of an elaborate scam by somebody who was his best friend.

Harris: You know, that actually raises an interesting question, right? Because this is an individual case that is incredibly outside of the norm. But if you think about sports betting as an enterprise, right—California, it’s illegal, but more than 30 states have some form of legalized sports betting at this point.

How big is legal sports betting in the United States at the moment?

Hill: I mean, it’s massive. It’s a billion-dollar industry. I mean, it was massive before then, but because it’s now so much more widely available, that has made it substantially bigger than it was before. And you’re seeing the effects of that at so many levels, particularly at the college level.

And, you know, now all of a sudden—it used to be, gambling was that sort of cardinal sin that sports leagues didn’t touch—and now you not only have sports leagues promoting it through various gambling sites; you also have Las Vegas. Las Vegas was supposed to not be the city that ever was going to really have professional sports.

And now they’re going to have, you know, professional baseball. They have a WNBA team. They have a football team—NFL team—as well. And most people anticipate Las Vegas will be getting an NBA team. And so the ties to professional gambling, at the professional level, has just gotten that much deeper.

And it’s come, of course, you know, with the infamous court decision to open up sports gambling everywhere. And so now, you know, just anecdotally, my husband and I talked about this not too long ago, but friends of his who, say, 10 or 15 years ago would only maybe gamble when they made a trip to Vegas—now they’re doing parlays. Now they’re all in on those every single week, and especially during the NFL or in the NBA, just daily. It’s just really consumed sports to the highest degree that we’ve ever seen.

Harris: I guess, have you been surprised by how quickly gambling has been accepted by these leagues?

Hill: You know, when you’re a journalist, nothing should ever surprise you, but this actually did. And I guess what was most surprising, it wasn’t the public’s appetite for it. The surprising factor has been seeing so many player scandals involving gambling. And I don’t know why that should surprise me, because, of course, they’re going to be susceptible to a lot of the same things the rest of the society is, and they have more money to be able to be involved with these things.

So the player-involvement part has been extremely surprising. But in terms of the public, you know, we saw something—and a lot of people look at it as harmless; I certainly have done it, and I did it for years until I retired years ago—but fantasy football. Fantasy football was the perfect gateway drug to what we’re seeing now.

Because it was sort of disguised gambling. I mean, yes, you weren’t really, because most people who are in leagues, you know, you have a pot at the end that somebody takes, and you have a second place and all that. But that’s kind of what you’re doing it for. It’s like you’re doing it for the glory. You’re doing it for the win.

But every week it’s teaching you how to individualize player performance in a way that is not necessarily always healthy when you’re screaming about why Davante Adams doesn’t get you another catch or 10 more yards or another touchdown so you can win your fantasy game.

It’s like priming you for this time. And so the pervasiveness of it has been a little surprising. Friends of mine who I just would never have considered them to be into gambling are like really in it now. And then you look at what’s happening with women’s sports with it.

The WNBA gambling is crazy. Like, I was on Twitter and somebody was complaining about—I think they had bet the over on Caitlin Clark, and they were complaining that she didn’t reach whatever point total that she was supposed to reach. And I’m just like, Oh my goodness. I mean, granted, yeah, I guess it’s great because it’s more interest in the women’s game. But at the same time, there’s going to be a level of, shall we say, degenerate interest in the women’s game, as well, because of this.

So just how quickly the public has really involved themselves in gambling has been a little surprising. Because I think there was even, with the public, a perception about gambling, like, That’s something you did in Vegas. If you were betting illegally, you know, people looked at you like you kind of had a problem, but now that it’s available and so widespread, it’s so much more accepted and socially acceptable to be gambling.

Harris: You know, it’s funny, I was talking to a colleague recently, and they were saying they went to a sports bar. I think it was actually around the NBA finals. And the games were on, and everyone was in there watching the games, incredibly interested. And it was like, Oh, wow, I didn’t know that there were this many Dallas Mavericks fans and Celtics fans, and they weren’t in Boston; they weren’t in Dallas.

But then he said everybody was looking at their phones, trying to check on their parlays, and it really has become like a new way to experience sports. Do you think that this is just how we experience sports now?

Hill: Yeah, I think it’s just considered by most people to be sort of harmless. But I guess if you look at it from a league perspective, they’re clearly enjoying it. Because, you know, we joke, especially among the media, like, Oh, the NBA or the NFL or whatever league doesn’t want these two teams meeting in the championship or this combination of playoffs involving these teams, because, you know, that means half the country’s not going to pay attention if it’s Dallas and Boston. Like, you know, Nobody cares in this part or this part. But now with gambling, everybody cares because somebody has something at stake.

And what it does is it makes the sports experience actually less personal. And a lot of us who began watching sports, we began watching for a personal reason—be it because you had a father or mother who introduced you to sports, being that you played sports and that was your connection.

It was always built on something that was emotional and personal, be it your hometown team—like in my case, being from Detroit, you know, I’m a forever Tigers fan because the Tigers won in ’84, and I was eight years old when they won. And that’s something that sticks and that lasts. And I still remember that whole team. And I remember my mother would lie to me and tell me that school was out for a day, and we would just sneak to go see the Tigers game and get a $5 bleacher seat—because, yes, I was the nerd who never wanted to miss school, and she would have to lie to me and tell me that school was out that day in order for us to go to opening day, right?

And so sports always came from an emotional place. But with this, it allows you to be impersonal about it. It’s like you don’t care really about the team; you care about who’s on the back of the jersey and what they’re doing and, more specifically, their performance.

So it’s actually building less loyalty in fans and less connection as they are gambling on these games.

Harris: Yeah. So how important has betting become to the bottom lines of the leagues and the networks now? How entrenched is it?

Hill: Oh, I mean, now they’re thick as thieves. You know, just in the network I used to work for—I worked at ESPN for 12 years—if when I got there in 2006, you would have told me that ESPN will one day have a show devoted to gambling and gambling segments, I’d have told you, you were crazy. I’d have told you, Give me that bet. Yeah, I’ll put a hundred on it.

Harris: That’s the smart money.

Hill: That’s the smart money because they wanted no parts about gambling. And, in fact, when I was there, it was a little bit of a running joke about how you couldn’t mention parlays or gambling. Like, you were not supposed to mention that on air at all because if somebody loses, they don’t want them, like, suing ESPN. Well, you know, Scott Van Pelt told me to bet this on that. And so that’s why I did it.

It was just never a thing that was supposed to happen. Now ESPN has a daily gambling show. Now, when I turn on the SportsCenter, they have gambling segments. You know, Scott Van Pelt—I mentioned him for a reason. He has a whole segment called “Bad Beats.”

And so you’re seeing, increasingly, and especially when you’re watching games and during the games, certain stats pop up because that’s for the gamblers, right? That’s what they’re doing that for. So even the way you watch sports is built on how a gambler would watch sports.

And it’s a relationship that I never thought would be this cozy, but if the networks want to maintain interest, especially in games that may not on the face of it look like big-ratings blockbusters, gambling is the way. And I’ll take it a step further: You know, these sports gambling sites—like, you know, FanDuel, DraftKings—I never thought I would see the relationship between gambling and sports media in the sense that gambling is funding a lot of sports media that’s happening right now.

Harris: You know, at some point, it’s not only an experience of the game; it kind of becomes an addiction, right? So how big of a problem is gambling addiction for fans?

Hill: So the only industry I can liken it to—and it’s going to sound like I’m being alarmist, and if I am, I’ll take that—I can only liken it to tobacco. And the reason why I think that comparison is there is that part of the way that tobacco became ingratiated in American culture is that it was sold as a lifestyle.

Harris: Hmm.

Hill: I think we’re seeing something similar with gambling, that gambling is being sold as: This is just how you’re supposed to watch and enjoy the game. This is how you enjoy sports: Lay 10 bucks on whether or not Angel Reese will have another double-double. Like, that’s how you watch the game. That’s how you get yourself more involved.

And I think, much like with tobacco, we’re going to look up five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever time period, and it’s going to be a real public-health crisis because you now have young people. And I know what the rules say about when you’re supposed to gamble, but as we know with cigarettes, ain’t nobody following them rules. And I can tell you that as a kid, I used to walk and buy my mama cigarettes at the store all the time, and nobody carded me once.

It’s going to be very similar. A younger and younger age group is going to be in on gambling and especially, you know, by the time they get to college, where I have a feeling the atmosphere has really amped up when it comes to gambling. We’re going to be looking at generations that are hooked on this, and especially with the technology there to support the addiction. I can’t imagine what cigarette usage would’ve looked like if Uber Eats existed, you know, 35 years ago, you know what I’m saying?

But it does in the form of gambling, when you just have to pop up an app and boom—there it is. You can lay money on any game happening with any sport in the country. And so, you know, I do realize for a lot of people, it’s fun, but I also see—and especially, again, when you see players doing it, that’s how you know that this is going to be a real problem in the future.

[Music]

Harris: All right, we’re going to take a short break. When we come back, we talk about how sports betting is affecting athletes themselves, especially as we see leagues giving out lifetime bans in recent months. That’s in a moment.

[Music]

Harris: All right, we’re back. So, Jemele, how are leagues supposed to manage this sort of mess of banning athletes who gamble while their businesses are so fundamentally tied up in advertising sports betting? To go through a couple of examples: Like, Tucupita Marcano, you know, baseball player, banned for life in June. NBA player Jontay Porter, banned for life in April.

Internationally—it’s not just an American phenomenon—England’s top professional men’s soccer league had three players over the last year who have been wrapped up in betting scandals, two of whom have received bans. So how do leagues manage that? That sort of, We need betting to fill out our bottom line, and alsoplayers to stay as far away from it as possible?

Hill: Yeah, I mean, they’re trying to make something really dangerous safer. And I don’t know if that’s actually possible. Like, I’m thinking about the NFL when it came to head trauma and concussions. It’s like they need the violence, because the violence sells, but they don’t need the violence, because the violence also is costly, I should say, because of what it does to players.

So to your point, they need gambling because, of course, as more and more rights fees with sports get more and more expensive, and as leagues look to diversify ways that they can make money, they need gambling to be big, if not bigger, in order to support interest in their league.

At the same time, they don’t need players involved with it, because, of course, they don’t want the product itself to lose integrity, which would have an impact on what fans thought of the game. But I’m glad that you mentioned the players that were banned, because here’s the thing that I also saw that has definitely changed with the proliferation of gambling: The lifetime ban isn’t the deterrent people think it is.

When Pete Rose was banned for life, and not just banned. It was two components: banned and kept out of the Hall of Fame, which you know players care about. They care about both. They want to play their sport and, certainly, if they’re remotely good at it, they want that Hall of Fame recognition. It means everything to them. And it was an amazing deterrent. Pete Rose was the banner case, where athletes would look at that and say, I don’t want to go out like Pete Rose. But now that you have seen it so commonly, the deterrence has sort of lost its luster.

And the stigma isn’t there like it used to be. And, you know, you can’t bet on your sport, but you can bet on other sports. And, see, that’s the other slippery slope, too, is that once that gateway is open with any gambling, especially if somebody develops an addiction, they’re going to go to the thing that they know best. The thing they know best is the sport that they play. So eventually, it may today start off on betting on soccer and betting on the WNBA or betting on tennis, and tomorrow it’s going to be their own sport that they’re betting on. And you mentioned Jontay Porter. I mean, he lost millions of dollars. He clearly had an addiction. And it was that addiction that drove him to do something where the automatic ban for doing what he did wasn’t enough of a deterrent.

So I don’t know how leagues are actually going to be able to prevent this. I think they’re just going to have to live with the fact that there’s going to be constant examples of players losing their careers to it.

Harris: And actually, can we explain the Porter case a little bit, because he had gotten to the point, allegedly, where he was literally sitting out parts of games or he would say that he wasn’t healthy for parts of games, as to satisfy bets. So can you just explain that case a little bit?

Hill: Yeah, I mean, so the thing that made his unique is that what he was doing was he—on a parlay, you either bet over or under—and what he was doing, he not only placed bets on games and bets on his team, including a bet on his team to lose, which is very important; he also falsely claimed that he was sick in at least one game. And realize: He started the game, but he claimed he was sick and he stopped playing. So all those gamblers who bet that he would do the under and underperform, they all won. And so, like, he was adjusting his performance accordingly.

So that’s what made it dangerous. And it gave people a very unsavory window into how a player can manipulate betting. You know, because for whoever is caught, you already know it’s 10 other people who haven’t been caught that are doing the same thing. And, of course, this is something that gambling sites don’t want to see, because they’re not trying to lose money, and they certainly want to have the confidence that players aren’t rigging games. And so his entire case was kind of a very stark example of the worst-possible scenario, or among the worst-possible scenarios that could happen.

Harris: Yeah, I thought it was interesting because he said that he did it to get out from under large gambling debts. So his argument’s like, I was crossing that bright red line because I had to get out of this debt that I had from this addiction that I have. And so that Porter case is like the most clear-cut example of gambling influencing a player. But it doesn’t have to be that extreme for it to be a problem, right?

Hill: Yeah, I mean, even something as simple that I’m sure a lot of players wouldn’t look at it as being particularly harmful, is that even telling your friends inside information, you can’t do that. Okay, you know, like, if you’re just like, Oh, I know for sure LeBron ain’t playing Thursday. It’s like, What? Like, you can’t do that, necessarily, especially for people, you know, who are gambling.

And so what it does is that it becomes, even for athletes, a tricky landscape to navigate because, as it is, they’re bombarded with people who want to take advantage of them in a thousand ways. And if somebody is in their circle or in their camp who is betting—because, just by osmosis, being around this player, they are privy to a lot of inside information—it’s something that can come back on them because they can be looked at as a co-conspirator.

And so not only is the league figuring this out in real time, but so are players. They’re going to be confronted with situations where somebody comes to him and says, Hey, any info you can give me, I’ll give you a cut. That’s easy money. You know what I’m saying?

And so I just fear that, like, a lot of the worst-case scenarios are happening behind closed doors that we haven’t quite seen yet. And many of them, I think, will be coming to light because the leagues are gonna have to toughen up, and they’re gonna have to police it more. And they’re already doing that, but I think it’s gonna require even more of their resources to do it. And, as you know, once you start focusing on it, you’re gonna find the culprits. And that’s just gonna make it look like it’s a widespread, uncontrollable problem.

Harris: Yeah. We’ve been talking about these professional leagues, where the athletes are already making a significant amount of money. What does this mean for college sports, right? Because over the last couple of years, student athletes have been taking universities to court, where the universities have been losing, and it’s all been about compensation, right? Whether or not students can use NIL, which is short for “name, image, and likeness,” in order to sign brand partnerships and receive some sort of profit from the work that they’ve been doing in playing their sport. What does this sort of growth of legalized sports betting mean for college sports?

Hill: We’re already seeing the scandals happen at the college level too—I mean, widespread gambling rings, where players are being drawn into the same sorts of temptations. And to your point, I know that NIL, that people think that’s the complete answer to the exploitation that happened in college athletes at that level, but it’s not.

I mean, number one, everybody isn’t making the same amount of money. So some guys on the team are able to make millions of dollars. A lot of guys on the team aren’t. And so the ones that aren’t and the ones that see an opportunity, they’re especially vulnerable to these kinds of temptations.

And, you know, it’s even harder to police at the college level because the NCAA just does not have the enforcement to be able to take on this problem. And I think they’re also considering how the NCAA has been massively whooped in court cases lately when it comes to student athletes. I think that they’re going through a period where they are thinking twice. And more than that, when it comes to how to police certain behaviors of student athletes because they have lost so resoundingly in court, they have to reshape, as it is right now, the entire financial structure of college sports.

And because that is taking precedence, I don’t even think they have the manpower, the wherewithal, or, frankly, the bandwidth to be able to also take on gambling. So, you know, there I could easily see a far more doomsday scenario than I could in the pros because, as of now, the money is not being evenly distributed.

Harris: You know, I wonder if we might see a micro example of that this summer, right? Because college athletics has always been seen as maybe more pure than professional sports, right? These are people who are doing it for the love, and they’re amateurs. But even further on that purity scale has kind of been the Olympics, right?

The Summer Olympics, I think of boxing as an example: amateur boxers are not allowed to make money. You can’t do brand endorsements. You can get, like, a stipend or prize money if you’re on the national team, but that’s kind of about it. Where you have prize fighters on the other side, where it was always about the money. What will betting around the Olympics look like this summer?

Hill: I think it’s gonna be huge. This is the Olympics where everything’s fully back, so to speak. It was supposed to be in 2020. It had to be delayed to 2021. And I think there was a lot of uncertainty around the Olympics.

But now it’s 2024, and everybody’s in full swing. And I think there’s going to be heavy action placed throughout the Olympics on everything. And you wonder if, six months down the road, are we going to hear about it? Because, as you mentioned, one thing that sports has not done a good job of is really admitted and dealt with the true impact of capitalism on what they’ve produced.

It’s like, as much as I know everybody loves the whole amateur, rags-to-riches story—and I get it; emotionally, it tugs at people—but that’s not the case anymore. When the Greeks were creating the Olympics, they did not envision it would become a billion-dollar television product.

And so you have to act accordingly. And often what catches these leagues off guard is that they’re holding on to old ideals and principles, mostly out of greed because they want to keep as much money as possible. But also, they just have not really, fully come to terms with the fact that you cannot, in this day and age, have a model, have a system where people don’t get paid. If you have a system and a model where people don’t get paid what they’re worth, or at least have a shot of getting paid what they’re worth, you’re inviting all the unsavory, seedy elements that you don’t want in your game.

And so it would not surprise me if, down the line—you know, months from now, a year from now—you heard about some Olympic athlete who decided to test it and decided to say, You know what? I see these parlays. I see what these bets are. I see these prop bets. Why wouldn’t I? I had this sort of crazy thought myself because there’s no regulation on it.

I was like, Man, if I were somebody who sang the national anthem and were doing it at sporting events, I would, especially the major ones, I put money on myself every single time. Because they always have a prop bet about how long the national anthem would go. And I’m like, Why would you not do this?

Harris: Two minutes and 40 seconds. I got you. (Laughs.)

Hill: You know what I’m saying? You’re a singer. You know exactly how long this is gonna be. (Laughs.) I was like, I would bet on myself every single time. So if I’m thinking that way about the national anthem, you mean to tell me there’s not at least dozens of athletes in the Olympics not thinking like, I kind of know what I could do. Why not? You know what I’m saying? (Laughs.)

Harris: I haven’t run under a 10.1 since high school.

Hill: It’s too tempting. And I don’t want to make this seem like the majority of athletes are this way. I know a lot of athletes. Most of them, there is a certain integrity in sports that they truly do believe in.

But there’s also a great number of athletes who are sick of being exploited and who want to be able to make money off the thing that they love to do. And that doesn’t make them a bad person. And, unfortunately, where we are with sports, we can’t unwind the clock and make it have less exploitation. Like, that toothpaste is not coming back into the tube. And so that’s why I say these governing bodies and these leagues are just going to have to come to terms with the fact that those old exploitation models are going to lead to their own demise and lead to them losing the very thing that they hold dear that binds the sport and makes it what it is.

Harris: Well, thank you so much for talking with me, Jemele.

Hill: I appreciate it. Anytime.

[Music]

Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Susan Banta. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic and will return next week. I’m Adam Harris. Thanks for listening.