AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Scourge of sports betting continues to get worse

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/11/2023 (625 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With the news that the NHL suspended Shane Pinto of the Ottawa Senators for a whopping 41 games for “activities relating to sports wagering,” it is clear the fears many had about the plague of sports betting are warranted.

The league hasn’t stated specifically what Pinto’s sports wagering activities exactly were, but they must have been substantial. You don’t suspend a player for a full half season on a whim or on speculation. The NHL must have evidence of some sort on which to justify such a lengthy suspension.

The menace of sports betting has two equally awful outcomes. First, the impact it has on players and officials who participate in sport and therefore have a direct effect on the integrity of the game and second the impact it has on sports fans who hope to make some money betting on their sport of choice.

We have seen the real-world impact of sports wagering on the public in recent legal maneuverings in Ontario. The province recently banned sports betting companies from using celebrities because of the impact those celebs have on impressionable teens and young adults.

That ban was put in place not on hearsay, not on a guess, but because experts said seeing your favourite hockey player or movie star condone and encourage sports betting was having a negative influence on young adults.

Noam Chomsky had it right when he wrote in Manufactured Consent that “gambling is a tax on poor people.”

The Pinto suspension, along with suspension of other athletes from other sports also makes clear the negative impact sports gambling has on professional athletes.

As you read this no less than 10 NFL players have been suspended for sports gambling. Three have been suspended indefinitely. Two players on the PGA’s Korn Ferry developmental tour were recently suspended for sports betting infractions. There was a huge scandal in 2007 in the NBA when a ref was caught fixing games. In amateur sports, the NCAA says infractions cases centered on sports betting are “spiking” right now in U.S. college sports.

To give you some idea of the scope of sports wagering, consider that in one three-month period in Ontario, people in Canada’s most populous province spent over $11 billion on sports betting. That figure did not include betting on the Super Bowl.

In the excited states of America, they have wagered $220 billion on sports since online sports gambling was expanded in 2018. Think of how much rent or groceries or medicines or clothes or donations to charity that money amounts to.

Watch any televised sport and the game is blanketed with ads promoting gambling. It is so ubiquitous that sports betting companies even have in-game segments where hosts encourage viewers to bet on the outcome of the game.

Sadly, professional sport has been consumed by the big money of sports betting companies and advertisers.

The dual problems related to sports gambling are obvious, but they get overlooked because the greed of the major sports leagues supersedes everything else.

Not only is the integrity of sport in question when players and refs bet on games, there is also the massive societal impact of problem gambling and addictions that are happening because it is now so easy to place a bet. All of us have a casino in our hands, thanks to the ease of sports betting on our cell phones.

It’s entirely unclear how the scourge of sports betting comes to an end. Leagues will always emphasize profits over people, so it’s nearly impossible to envision any league turning down boatloads of money, no matter what the negative impacts those boatloads of money are having on people who spend money on sports gambling instead of the necessities of life.