Sports Leagues Traded Their Gambling Bans for Revenue — and Scandals Followed

The Sport24.lt Team follows Lithuanian and international sports coverage and has noticed how closely betting content has become connected with modern sports media. Fans can now come across odds, sponsorships and betting-related stories while simply checking scores, injury updates or the latest results.

There are occasions when we here at ReadyBetGo want to bring you interesting facts about the gambling industry  When something catches our eye, we will publish it for your enjoyment.

This is especially noticeable in Sports news, where betting information increasingly appears alongside traditional coverage of matches, players and teams. The trend is particularly visible in the United States, where the American Gaming Association reported that gross gaming revenue reached $7.06 billion in May 2026 alone. The figure highlights the scale of the gambling industry and how closely it has become linked with professional sports.

“If we don't do this, we can't control it, meaning that it's so big anyway we might as well embrace it and be part of it.”

That comment, attributed to UCLA psychiatry professor Timothy Fong, reflects one argument behind the growing relationship between sports and gambling. At the same time, concerns about the impact of that relationship have continued to surface. The San Diego Union-Tribune recently examined whether the wider adoption of betting has played a role in a series of sports-integrity controversies.

From the Black Sox to the Supreme Court

The starting point for any honest account of sports and gambling is 1919. The attempt to fix that year's World Series, the event known as the Black Sox scandal, produced one of American sport's most consequential institutional responses. Baseball installed its first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who permanently banned eight players tied to the plot and cut whatever remaining threads connected the sport to gambling interests. The message was deliberate and absolute. Gambling was not a partner; it was an existential threat.

That position held, more or less, across major American sports for nearly a century. The rupture came in 2018, when the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association to overturn the federal ban on sports betting. States could now legalize it on their own terms. Most did. Currently 39 states plus the District of Columbia have legalized sports betting in some form. Thirty of those specifically allow wagering online or through phone apps. The wall Landis built came down in a single ruling.

A Betting Market That Keeps Growing

The scale of what followed is worth sitting with. Beyond the May 2026 monthly gross gaming figure of $7.06 billion, sports betting specifically generated $1.34 billion in revenue that month. For the first five months of 2026, the U.S. sports betting handle reached $7.08 billion, up 8.5 percent from the same period in 2025, out of an overall gaming total of $34 billion.

What drives those numbers is access. Fong, co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, describes the current moment as "frictionless gambling" — placing a bet via phone or laptop is now as easy as sending an email, while gambling advertisements run throughout game broadcasts. Platforms that began as daily fantasy sports operations, FanDuel and DraftKings among them, now broker bets the same way as BetMGM. Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket operate on the same fundamental concept: putting money behind an opinion or instinct. As Fong put it, "The actual behavior, the actual act (with the prediction markets) is exactly the same as sports betting."

Three Cases That Put Integrity on Trial

The scandals that followed legalization are not hypothetical. They are documented, and they span leagues.

In the NBA, Jontay Porter was banned in 2024 after the league determined he had manipulated his own play and availability, then tipped off bettors who placed prop bets on the information he provided, including wagers on his minutes played. The scheme, per the Union-Tribune, was connected to large gambling debts Porter was trying to clear.

A separate federal investigation into fixed poker games implicated then-Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former player and coach Damon Jones. According to reporting by The Athletic cited in the Union-Tribune, Rozier, Billups, and Jones were allegedly used as lures to attract players who were the actual targets of the scheme. Rozier had previously been investigated by the NBA over suspicious prop bets.

College football provided its own cautionary case. Quarterback Branden Sorsby's transfer to Texas Tech and a potential NFL supplemental draft entry were both derailed after it emerged he had placed thousands of bets totaling $90,000 as a college athlete at Indiana. Some of those bets, placed when he was a freshman, were on games involving his own team.

Beyond the formal investigations, something more corrosive is also visible. Last summer, Jordan Whitlock, wife of Boston Red Sox pitcher Garrett Whitlock, posted on social media exposing threatening direct messages her husband had received from bettors after a rough outing. "No one should have to deal with this in any work setting," she wrote. "Leave people's families out of it. That line should not be crossed. This is not 'a part of the game.' This is unacceptable." The threats were not a product of gambling alone, but the financial stakes betting creates sharpened the menace considerably.

Prop Bets, Broadcast Saturation, and the Limits of Industry Caution

Fong's analysis of why the industry arrived here, and why it stays, centers on incentive structures. Organizations including the NCAA, the NFL, the MLB Players Association, and the Association of Certified Gaming Compliance Specialists have all advocated for eliminating prop bets. Prop bets persist because they are profitable for the platforms and operators that offer them.

Athletes, Fong argues, face elevated risk by proximity. They are exposed to the same advertising as everyone else, carry the same vulnerabilities to addiction, and operate in environments saturated with gambling content. The marketing message compounds that exposure. "People (are) telling you you should do this," Fong said. "This is a good thing. This is a harmless thing. This is something everyone does well with, right?"

A more cautious industry approach exists, in theory. Fong described what it might look like: gambling-free broadcasts, betting signage confined to 21-and-over stadium lounges rather than general areas, and an end to the celebratory advertising that currently fills airtime. "You don't see that with tobacco and cannabis ads because they're highly regulated," he noted. Leagues have not moved in that direction.

The underlying tension Fong identifies is structural. Both the sports industry and the gambling industry depend on the games appearing legitimate. Compromised outcomes erode the product both sides are selling. Yet prop bets, the mechanism most directly tied to the Porter ban and the Rozier investigation, remain on the market because they generate revenue. The incentive to keep them runs directly against the integrity argument for removing them — and so far, the revenue side is winning.