There was no ruling today, but with yet another date approaching later this month for the U.S. Supreme Court to potentially provide a landmark ruling on sports betting, Sportradar Deputy President Laila Mintas, in an exclusive interview with SportTechie, expounded upon the company’s advocacy for a centralized body to monitor sports integrity should the court’s ruling permit sports betting throughout the U.S.
A ruling is expected anytime between late April and late June on Christie vs. NCAA, which will determine whether the court invalidates as unconstitutional the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a federal statute that bans sports betting outside of Nevada. The ruling could allow the state of New Jersey (and ultimately other states) to regulate legalized gambling. The case is expected to unlock betting opportunities across the U.S.
Sportradar, a global sports data company that has partnerships with the NBA, MLB, NHL and NFL, will likely play a role in helping leagues and lawmakers determine how such a regulatory framework will be built should the court’s ruling permit broader sports betting in the U.S. In an interview with SportTechie, Mintas made it clear that Sportradar plans to push for a centralized body that would use services (such as those Sportradar provides) to detect betting irregularities to protect against corruption and match-fixing.
Mintas says the current system of laws governing sports gambling in the U.S. has failed and needs to be replaced, with many people in the U.S. still finding a way to bet on sports by wagering in offshore markets to the tune of $200 billion a year. But as positive as a ruling in favor of nationwide gambling would be for its stakeholders, including Sportradar, Mintas argues that the new regulatory environment would only be as successful as the framework it’s built upon. One of the best ways to ensure the integrity of sports and the betting market, she says, would be to build a centralized authority overseeing exactly that.
Sportradar is advocating for a central bet-monitoring system that would collate and analyze on an anonymized and real-time basis all bets made at licensed operators. It believes this data should be cross-referenced with integrity data from the international betting market (data that Sportradar has been collecting abroad for years) to get a “complete global picture” of sports gambling, which would help identify irregularities and suspicious behavior that might otherwise threaten the integrity of sports.
“The solution would allow regulators to have complete regulatory oversight of wagers from an integrity and compliance perspective and give regulators and leagues an overarching view across all wagers, operators and sports, to spot patterns and trends of interest you otherwise wouldn’t be able to,” Mintas said.
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Sportradar isn’t the only sports data company to argue for such a body, and Mintas says the company encourages competition because it helps ensure the quality of data and ensures that no single point of failure will impact the entire market. One of its competitors, Genius Sports, recently launched an entire website featuring executives from MLB and PGA Tour arguing for such a governing body.
Sportradar, however, believes its deep experience working with betting operators outside of the U.S. gives it unique insight into potential vulnerabilities, particularly when it comes to match-fixing. To date, the company has detected and reported to its partners more than 3,500 sporting fixtures as likely manipulated. Its findings have initiated or supported more than 240 sporting and criminal betting corruption-related sanctions worldwide.
Mintas says sports gambling reform is necessary in the U.S. given how lucrative sports and betting are as businesses, but says the process of channeling the unregulated sports market into a regulated market needs to be handled carefully, via a “fundamentally sound framework design and implementation encouraging an open and competitive marketplace” across international borders. That would include ensuring that all forms of sports gambling — land-based, online, mobile and in-play sports wagering — are included in the regulatory framework so that licensed operators can ensure that all bets are placed through approved channels and not otherwise funneled through to unregulated competitors overseas.
“Bringing as much of the [unregulated and illegal market] under the sophisticated and technologically advanced microscope of bet monitoring can only increase the probability of detecting and thwarting any attempt to fix or otherwise corrupt a sporting event,” she said.
SportTechie Takeaway
Sportradar’s “centralized authority” concept works best if there is one, central government-based authority to work with the company. Naturally, the U.S. Congress and the federal government would be a fit. But whether Congress has the opportunity to act depends on how the Supreme Court rules.
Multiple leagues have proposed an integrity fee, a concept supported by Sportradar, that would allow the leagues to take a cut of government sports betting revenue. The plan could be implemented more easily if Congress put forth a nationwide regulatory system for sports betting, rather than piecemeal regulations from each state.
The best outcome for Sportradar it appears, is if PASPA is upheld as constitutional, thus permitting the leagues to lobby Congress for new, nationwide legislation to regulate sports betting, and allowing Sportradar to advocate for providing its services to the new “centralized authority”.
But there are two other potential outcomes, as explained succinctly by gaming and sports attorney Dan Wallach on The Ringer. One is that the court rules PASPA unconstitutional and the states race to enact sports betting regulation. That result doesn’t appear to fit as nicely into Sportradar’s centralized-authority plan.
The other is that New Jersey’s attempt to regulate sports betting does not violate PASPA, nor is PASPA unconstitutional (at least not on the whole). That would mean that New Jersey alone, and no other additional states, could move forward with legalized sports betting. According to Wallach, that result would grant New Jersey a natural monopoly for sports betting on the East Coast, and could leave other states, sports leagues, and companies like Sportradar scrambling to react.