Legal gambling enhances sports integrity—despite what critics claim

Jack Butler’s recent National Review piece, “Bad Bets: The New Culture of Sports Gambling,” argues that sports gambling is corroding the integrity of American sports. Citing high-profile scandals—most notably, the NBA’s lifetime ban of Raptors center Jontay Porter for manipulating his in-game performance to influence bets—Butler claims that the legalization of sports betting is to blame for corruption. But, in truth, cases like Porter’s  demonstrate how legal, regulated sports betting is the best tool we have to protect the integrity of sports and safeguard consumers.

In the shadowy world of illegal gambling, where there is no legal oversight, corruption is harder to detect and easier to profit from. Offshore bookies have no obligation to report suspicious activity and may even benefit from match-fixing if it helps balance their books. By contrast, legal markets create transparency. It was, in fact, regulated sportsbooks that first flagged unusual betting activity around Porter’s games and alerted authorities, triggering investigations by the NBA, the Colorado Division of Gaming, and federal law enforcement.

In an illegal betting market, Porter’s misbehavior might never have been uncovered. This is not an anomaly. From the infamous “Black Sox” scandal—in which several members of Chicago White Sox were allegedly paid by a gambling syndicate to lose the 1919 World Series—to the present day, it is almost always the bookies who catch on to match-fixing earliest. In regulated markets, those bookies have not only the tools to spot corruption, but also the financial and legal impetus to do something about it.

Butler’s nostalgia for a pre-2018 era—when federal law prevented most states from regulating sports betting—is misguided. By 2015 Americans were placing an estimated $150 billion in illegal sports wagers annually—primarily through offshore sportsbooks and with no consumer protections or oversight. Prohibition didn’t stop sports betting, but it did preserve the illusion that it wasn’t happening and that sports were “clean.”

Butler’s essay does raise valid concerns surrounding the implementation of sports betting laws, including potentially predatory behavior by gambling companies, inadequate support for problem gamblers, and lax consumer protections. But, these are arguments for better regulation, not recriminalization. States are refining their rules around betting behavior, advertising, and consumer protections as regulators gain expertise and learn from other state’s experiences. This iterative process is how federalism is supposed to work.

Butler’s discomfort with the “normalization” of sports betting in American culture echoes a broader paternalism that conflates visibility with harm. Legalization didn’t create the demand—Americans have bet on sports for decades—but it did provide safe and regulated environments for that demand to be satisfied legally. He may lament the loss of its “dodgy stigma…suspect bookies” and “dilapidated parlors.” Yet, that stigma and potential danger didn’t deter bettors—it only forced them into unnecessarily risky environments, leaving especially vulnerable gamblers, like women, without the protections offered by legal sportsbooks.

Legalization has increased the visibility of sports betting, including in-game odds analysis and marketing for betting opportunities that clearly rub some sports fans the wrong way. But this criticism confuses cultural discomfort with genuine harm. Analysis of betting odds has been integrated into sports coverage for decades, with a majority of newspapers publishing betting lines since the 1980s. Ad saturation, while perhaps annoying, is neither new nor uniquely dangerous—it’s the inevitable byproduct of moving a once-clandestine activity into the regulated marketplace.

His most alarming criticisms of sports gambling legalization center on the assertion that legal sports betting increases domestic violence and brings financial ruin to families. But these claims immediately collapse under scrutiny. The studies he implicitly relies on, like those critiqued by my colleague Jacob James Rich, suffer from such glaring methodological flaws that their conclusions are unreliable. One frequently cited paper by Kyutaro Matsuzawa and Emily Arnesen tied intimate partner violence in states with legal sports betting to home-team losses but ignored the effect of away games and whether those committing violence actually bet on games, skewing results.

Another study by  Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and David Proserpio attributes a trivial 0.3% dip in credit scores post-gambling legalization, then stretches this to blame legalization for bankruptcies. Not only do such studies conflate correlation with causation—a recurring issue in gambling research—they also distract from the real issue of abusive behavior, which studies link to sports losses even in the absence of gambling. Should we ban football games to curb violence? Of course not. The solution is to hold abusers accountable and investigate the actual root causes of violence and financial instability; not to scapegoat a legal industry and responsible gamers for societal ills.

None of this is to say that sports betting is free of risk. There will continue to be bad actors in the worlds of sports and gambling and some portion of the population will likely always struggle with disordered gambling whether the activity is legal or not. But these realities demand clear-eyed policy—not prohibition.

Butler begrudgingly acknowledges a “reversal of legalization does not seem to be in the cards, for now.” Instead, he urges states to regulate the activity “carefully” and learn from the experience of their neighbors. On that, at least, we agree. For more than a quarter century, Congress ignored the growing problem of illicit sports betting, despite its own experts declaring it “the most widespread form of gambling in America” as early as 1999. Yet, in the mere seven years since the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban, 38 states have legalized and regulated the activity, with many repeatedly revisiting those rules and refining them in response to consumer demand, evolving industry practices, and learning lessons.

While not all states got it right from the jump, they have demonstrated a willingness and ability respond, revise, and improve. That is what a healthy regulatory process looks like and supposedly what our federalist system is meant to do: empower states to act as laboratories of democracy, learning from each other and adjusting policies as needed.

That is the path forward—not prohibition, not moral panic, not virtue-policing adults, and certainly not a return to the days when illicit gambling and corruption flourished in the shadows. 

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