Sports gambling is a sure bet
News from Ottawa that the federal government will soon liberate Canada’s sports bettors will be met in many quarters with a simple two- word response: About time.
Attempts to change the wording in the Criminal Code that prohibits the taking of a bet on a single event — while allowing the multi- bet parlays offered by provincial lottery companies — go back more than a decade and got as far as the Senate five years ago. The United States dropped its gambling ban in 2018, and more than 20 states have legalized betting and taken in hundreds of millions in new revenue. Professional sports leagues, officially aghast at the prospect of legalized betting as recently as 2013, gave up that fight and crossed the aisle, signing sponsorships with casinos and providing their data to betting companies to help facilitate the market. The NHL and NFL went from pretending Las Vegas didn’t exist to putting literal teams there.
There’s also an online betting market, based offshore or on First Nations land, that already takes wagers from Canadians.
Columns like this one inevitably provoke responses from readers along the lines of “Duh, it’s already legal to bet on games because I do it a lot.” You may, but it isn’t.
So, yes, about time.
But what will be interesting to watch in the coming months — assuming the legislation passes, which is no, ahem, sure bet — will be how the provinces, which regulate gaming, handle this new world. Tight regulations would decrease the risk from side effects like problem gambling, but they would also decrease the amount of money flowing into provincial coffers. Provinces, which have pushed the federal government to make this legislative change, will now have to figure out how much of a sports- wagering market they want to allow to flourish before it becomes a problem.
In the United Kingdom, there is a growing sentiment that it’s a problem. That government liberalized gaming laws 15 years ago, and wagering has grown to become a major part of the sports economy. Gambling is pervasive in English soccer, with more than half of the teams in the top two leagues having a gaming company as the primary sponsor on their jersey, and the lower leagues themselves have a gambling operator as a title sponsor.
The ease and accessibility of placing a bet in the smartphone age has meanwhile caused a sharp rise in gaming activity during and around matches; gambling companies in the U. K. agreed last season to cease advertising from the opening whistle of a game to its end. The Conservative government of Boris Johnson is reportedly planning a sig
nificant review of gambling laws, although whether the pandemic affects those plans is unclear.
There’s no suggestion the United Kingdom would come anywhere close to bringing sports betting back to the outlaw status it now has in Canada, but tighter rules could ban jersey sponsorships, for example, and put a greater onus on betting houses to ensure they do not take advantage of addicts. One practice often cited by anti-gambling advocates is the use of employees with anodyne titles like “relationship manager” who are tasked with coaching high- volume bettors into placing more and riskier wagers.
The underlying issue is that English soccer has enjoyed so much gambling-related money that trying to squeeze the industry now will cause a financial crisis in the country’s most popular sport.
There’s a comparable precedent on these shores, where the Ontario government in the 1990s allowed horse- racing tracks to put slot machines at their facilities, with a portion of the revenues to go to the racing industry. It soon grew fat on easy slots money, and when the government decided years later that it didn’t want to share those hundreds of millions anymore, the horse- racing industry was threatened with devastation. It was instead propped up by taxpayer money, an arrangement that has persisted for eight years and shows no signs of ending.
The commonality is that
few enterprises grow as quickly as those involving gaming. Once the taps are open, money pours in. So how wide will the taps be open? Will provinces be quick to add as much betting money to their purses as they can? Will some bring in private operators who have more experience separating bettors from their cash? And will the sports industry — leagues, teams, broadcasters, media — add gambling partnerships and deals so fast that it quickly becomes as much a part of the landscape here as it is in other countries?
For years now there has been an ongoing inside joke where certain play- by- play announcers would make jokes about the importance of, say, a late field- goal that would have no impact on the game’s outcome but would swing certain bets from winners to losers. Al Michaels was the gold standard, never actually mentioning the point spread — that was forbidden — but slyly noting the impact of a play that would interest “certain” viewers as his partner in the booth giggled.
It might not be long before Michaels is calling games on Caesar’s Sunday Night Football, or a Super Bowl presented by MGM Resorts and Casino.
It has taken a long time for the prospect of legal single- sports betting to get to this point. But the distance from here to wide acceptance will likely prove to be remarkably short.