Canada to feel heat from U.S. betting play
Lottery agencies likely poised to enter single-game wagering arena, analyst says
When it comes to sports betting, Canada is all of a sudden trailing the field.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday to throw out a law that banned most sports betting in America; Nevada, of course, was always exempt. The ruling overturns what’s been essentially a century of U.S. policy.
North of the border, provincial gaming agencies like B.C.’s Sports Action have long been permitted to take parlay bets, which means more than one game at a time. But Monday’s news means that Americans will now be able to legally place wagers on individual games, leapfrogging their bettor friends to the north.
The pressure on Canadian agencies is coming, Vancouver sportsbusiness commentator Tom Mayenknecht said.
“It will put the issue back on the front-burner here in Canada as well,” he said.
“There’s no doubt in my mind the provincial lottery corporations are ready to take the lead given the right federal legislation.
“It’s a huge development for sports betting in North America and will allow it to catch up with Europe and Asia, where sports betting has been legal for years.”
B.C.’s attorney general acknowledged there are issues associated with prohibitions on single-game betting.
“So long as single-event sports betting is criminalized in Canada, Canadians who engage in this type of betting online do so in a completely unregulated and potentially unsafe way, with few or no responsible gambling protections or enforced-age restrictions,” David Eby said in an emailed statement.
If single-game betting were to be legalized, there would be a need to protect sports from corrupting influences.
“In Canada, this issue is better addressed with good policy and law-developed discussion between provinces and the federal government, instead of an abrupt court decision as the Americans are currently grappling with,” he said.
A longtime observer of matchfixing and sports gambling had strong words of caution over what’s to come.
“It’s the biggest move since the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal,” Declan Hill said.
The American Gaming Association estimates that Americans illegally wager about US$150 billion on sports each year; many observers believe that with more people betting on games, TV viewership will go up. The sports landscape, from sponsorship to gambling addiction, is set to shift. “If you wanted to fix a game in the U.S., you had to work with the mob and that wasn’t attractive to most athletes,” Hill said. “To be fair to the leagues, for decades ( banning betting ) was a good way to cut down on stuff like this.”
Allowing more opportunities for betting allows for more fixing, meaning there will be more need for outside monitoring.
Match-fixing, after all, isn’t just about changing the results of matches, it’s about corrupting all kinds of smaller moments inside games, like how many yellow cards get doled out in a soccer game or whether a certain player fouls out in a basketball game or how many goals a hockey goalie might give up in a period.
As more money gets spent, the harder it will be to spot deviations in behaviour.
“When you’re fixing, there’s two things: there’s fixing the event and there’s fixing the market. The bigger the thing the easier it is to fix something,” Hill said. “Above a certain threshold, you can’t see the fixes. In a penny stock market, you can see (fixes), but in a Fortune 500 company, you can’t tell.”
A whole new range of corrupting opportunities will appear before athletes, with some more vulnerable than others.
“Think about a footballer in the U.K. who walks past plenty of betting shops on the way to the stadium,” he said.
“It’s going to be a massive problem for the NCAA, where the athletes aren’t paid.”
On a global scale, between US$1 billion and $3 billion is spent on a single World Cup match, he said. Money gets bet on moments within them.
“An essential question is, ‘Do you believe what you’re watching?’ That’s where the existential danger to sports lies,” Hill said.