Since Missouri’s sports betting industry launched on Dec. 1, residents have wagered nearly a billion dollars. Professional sports teams like the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals have official sportsbook partners that generate significant additional revenue for franchises in the metro — even if the states are making close to nothing on taxes.
But as legal sports gambling becomes more accessible than ever, Marcus Meade, a UMKC professor who also hosts the Royals Weekly Podcast, says this omnipresence could threaten the integrity of the competition itself.
“I think every time you look throughout history, every time gambling gets involved in sports, the integrity of sports is very much at risk. You think about the Black Sox Scandal of the early 1900s and that sort of thing that is a black eye for baseball that actually took many, many years to recover from,” Meade told KCUR’s Up To Date.
Earlier this week, Major League Soccer gave lifetime bans to two players, Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah, after betting on their own games. Last summer, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians were put on indefinite leave by Major League Baseball after a scandal that involved intentionally throwing pitches outside of the strike zone to benefit bettors.
The National Basketball Association also faced a major scandal related to gambling last fall.
“The leagues even recognize that it's a big issue (right now), which is why I think you're going to see in these cases, they're going to come down hard,” Meade said. “They're going to make an example of these players who are the first out of the gate to do something bad to show everyone else, ‘If you take this risk, you are going to have huge, huge, huge penalties for it.’”
According to Jordan Bass, the department chair of the University of Kansas Health, Sport and Exercise Science department, figuring out how to police this issue is difficult because cases can be easy to hide.
“For every Emmanuel Clase example or the MLS example, there are people that are doing this in a much ‘better’ way. They’re doing it in a more discreet way for a less amount of money, without their name tied to it,” he explained.
Bass told KCUR that this issue could potentially become a barrier to keeping fans interested in sports.
“If I see fans start to wonder, ‘Hey, is that player doing this because they’re having an off night, or is the off night influenced by something else?’ That’s when as a league or as a team, then I probably start to get concerned,” Bass said.
Bass believes it is clear that leagues and teams are “heavily invested” in trying to prevent players from gambling on their own games.
“But, we’re always going to be a step behind, right? Whether it’s gambling or anything else.”
- Marcus Meade, assistant teaching professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City Honors Program, and host of Royals Weekly podcast
- Jordan Bass, department chair and professor, Health, Sport and Exercise Science department, the University of Kansas
