Achi news desk-
Does Canada have a sports betting problem inside?
Two athletes for Canadian teams were recently punished for gambling, and experts say the cases highlight a growing – and significant – challenge for the future of professional sports.
Jontay Porter, who played for the Toronto Raptors, banned for life by the NBA following a league investigation. Meanwhile, Shawn Lemon was suspended indefinitely by the CFL last week after “an investigation revealed that Mr. Lemon betting on CFL games in 2021 while a member of the Calgary Stampeders,” the league said.
And down south, Los Angeles Dodgers superstar interpreter Shohei Ohtani allegedly stole $16 million from the player to pay off a gambling debt.
Sports betting isn’t new, but now that online betting is legal in parts of Canada, including Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, it’s easier to access and more visible than ever.
Moshe Lander, professor of sports economics at Concordia University, told Global News that sports betting has a long history, the most famous story being the “Chicago Black Sox Scandal.”
It was then that eight members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team were accused of intentionally losing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
Lander said sports and gambling go hand in hand, and sports leagues have jumped on the bandwagon.
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Athletes like Wayne Gretzky or Connor McDavid appear in betting ads now, and the leagues themselves promote it. That makes it harder for the leagues to stand against it with their own players, said Lander.
But he says that they must come down firmly against the inside betting, for the integrity of the sport.
“Sports as a business sells you on what is called outcome uncertainty,” Lander said. “I need to believe that what I watch is not predetermined. It is not stable.
“If I feel for a moment that the whole sport is being overcome by the actors themselves who remove that uncertainty of outcome, professional sport is over.”
This threat to sports is what causes leagues to take inside betting seriously and come down hard on it, Lander said, often with lifetime bans.
So if athletes know they could lose everything they work towards, and maybe not even make as much money as they would playing the game, then why do they do it?
Michael Naraine, associate professor of sports management at Brock University, reasoned that it could be related to the hyper-competitive nature of athletes and the addictive element of gambling.
He gave the example of Michael Jordan, who was an avid gambler.
For those hooked on gambling, the dopamine rush and the narrative of fighting against the odds can often be difficult for athletes to pass up, says Naraine, even if the odds of getting caught loudly.
Naraine said that now that sports betting is online, the back-end analytics are robust and anomalies are easily pointed out. In the case of Jontay Porter, the league said an internal auditor determined he was placing bets through a connector with online sportsbook DraftKings, and that the service flagged the activity.
The NBA called Porter’s actions “flagrant.”
Lander predicts that cases of athletes caught in similar situations will grow for the next few years given that legal betting has brought it all out into the open, but he said he will settle for down
“It’s going to be more common that we see people getting caught up in this,” he said. “People are trying to figure out where the red lines are that we can’t cross.”
The problem is not limited to Canada, though, as parts of the United States have also legalized sports betting, according to Lander.
He compared online sports betting to the legalized cannabis market in Canada, where kinks had to be ironed out over time.
“It’s been the wild, wild west,” Naraine said.
& copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
