Sports leagues used to talk about the gambling industry as if it were the devil itself. This may be hard to recall now, at the end of 2025, with major sports so intertwined with gambling that you wonder if our games still exist to crown champions or merely as fodder for young, twitchy-fingered sportsbook customers.
In November 2012, Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball at the time, declared that gambling was “evil.” “It destroys your sport and creates doubt.”
When asked about risks to the integrity of professional football that same week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated that “gambling would be number one on my list.”
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In depositions related to a lawsuit brought by America’s major sports leagues against the state of New Jersey over its intentions to allow sports gambling, both remarks were made under oath. That issue eventually reached the Supreme Court, which rendered a historic ruling in Murphy v. NCAA in 2018 that essentially legalized sports betting across the country.
When confronted with this new reality, those same American sports leagues did more than just shake hands with a business they had previously considered the enemy; instead, they jumped into bed with it, radically changing the way sports are marketed, packaged, and consumed.
Sportsbook advertisements are everywhere in stadiums. broadcasts that are chock full of gambling advertisements and analysis of odds and betting lines. an expanding selection of live, in-game microbetting options, essentially putting a casino in the palm of players’ hands. Americans legally wagered a record $148 billion on sports in 2024 alone, with over 95% of that amount occurring online. By 2025, that amount is most likely to be exceeded.
However, 2025 can also be seen as the year that the unholy union of sports and legalized gambling came to light. The NBA, MLB, and NCAA were all shaken by betting scandals. Simultaneously, the contemporary issue of irate bettors harassing and threatening sportsmen online developed into something akin to an epidemic. The popularity and simplicity of prop bets, which concentrate on a particular player’s actions or performance rather than the result of a game, seems to be the motivating factor in both situations.
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