Leonsis: Arenas one day could be betting hubs
The best way to foresee the future, Ted Leonsis says, is to invent it.
The arena in Washington, D.C., where his Capitals and Wizards play opens an hour or so before games and empties out quickly after, but he expects all that will change in years to come as arenas become casinos of a sort — open nearly around the clock to capture a coming mania for legalized sports betting.
“I think you will see buildings like Capital One Arena being reimagined,” Leonsis says. “So we want people to come into our buildings to have lunch, to have dinner when there’s not a game in the building, watch other games on television, do research, bet, wager — and look at our buildings as really alive, dynamic sports cathedrals.”
Leonsis spoke to USA TODAY in ad-
vance of a conference on legalized sports betting that was held Thursday in Washington. Public policy experts and leaders from the gaming and sports industries gathered at a Senate office building to discuss a topic that has taken on added urgency since May, when the Supreme Court opened up sports gambling to any states that choose to embrace it.
The NHL and NBA have recently signed agreements to provide MGM Resorts International with data for use in betting. MGM will access the data through Sportradar, which provides services to national and international sports federations, media companies and bookmakers.
Shared sports data and enhanced analytics allow bookmakers to set better odds, but they are also expected to lead to real-time proposition bets. Fans would be able to wager on if the next free throw will be made or missed, for instance, or whether there will be a goal on the next power play and who will score it.
“I think we’ll see variations of that,” says Jake Williams, vice president of legal and regulatory affairs for Sportradar U.S. “We’re seeing derivative betting take place for the last four or five years much more expansively” in international markets. “So I think that will permeate throughout the U.S. and we’ll have a lot of in-play wagering, a lot of side bets and prop bets. Or even things like you can bet on what type of fantasy score a certain player will have.”
Leonsis sees sports teams increasing in value as they begin to partner with tech companies for advanced sports betting.
“I don’t see ever the teams having a piece of the money, or frankly even the leagues being in the sports betting business and getting a piece of what’s called the handle,” Leonsis says. “But who you partner with, be it a DraftKings or a casino or international player or some new company or it’s not wild to think that a really big financial services or big data partner could enter the business to be a partner with us.
“So five years from now, it could be an Amazon is streaming and your subscription is part of Prime, and they have your credit card on file and you’re able to bet live through an Amazon. And you would have never envisioned that something like that could happen. And you say, ‘I remember when Amazon was the world’s biggest bookstore.’ ”
Leonsis says today leagues partner with big media companies but he expects big tech companies — “such as a Google, an Apple” — will enter that mix in coming years.
“They’ll look now and see, hey, this isn’t just a TV product, this is a big data, multimedia product,” he says. “It can bring us a big audience. And it can create a whole new line of business. Be- cause if we can get the Apples of the world and the Amazons of the world bidding to be partners with us, those companies are so mega-successful and there is so much cash it just literally would be a game-changer for the leagues.”
These are the same leagues that fought legalized sports betting for decades on fears of game-fixing and point shaving. But proponents say regulated sports betting leads to better monitoring of suspicious shifts in betting lines.
“We want to make sure we put in place the best regulated framework possible,” Williams says, “protecting the players, the athletes, the teams and everyone else within the ecosystem. Because the reality is no one wants matchfixing. Integrity is critically important for all stakeholders in the sports betting ecosystem,” including consumers.
All of this is going to make sports teams themselves more like technology and communications companies, Leonsis says.
“I would expect that the leagues soon or one day will mandate that every arena have the same kind of high-fidelity bandwidth,” he says. “We’ll all have to be at 5G by a certain date. And that’s important, because you need to be able to transmit information in real time” when teams are “living in a real-time gaming world.”