As the National Football League completed the first of three sold-out games scheduled for London’s Wembley Stadium this year, the American Gaming Association decided to use the NFL games in London—where at least one game per season has been played since 2007—as an example of how legalized sports betting, rather than hurting the integrity of the sport, works perfectly and actually promotes the integrity of the game.
“We applaud the NFL’s willingness to once again host games in a city where betting on sports is a national pastime and a mainstream form of entertainment,” said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the AGA. “While sports fans across the United States are also betting on these games—largely illegally because of an outdated and failing law—millions of dollars will be bet in London on the NFL games in a legal, regulated and safe manner.”
The AGA has made the legalization of sports betting in the U.S. a key element of its “Stop Illegal Gambling—Play It Safe” campaign, regularly making comparisons between the less than $2 billion wagered legally at Nevada sports books annually to the estimated $93 billion wagered on sports illegally in the U.S.—unregulated, untaxed wagers that enrich criminal networks, and fund drug trafficking, human trafficking and worse.
On last year’s Super Bowl alone, AGA notes, Americans wagered $3.8 billion illegally, which was around 38 times greater than the total legal bets.
In a press release, the AGA cited an ESPN report last year that identified more than 30 gambling parlors in the Wembley Park area where the stadium is located, which “receive up to a 100 percent increase in the amount wagered on the NFL games played at Wembley Stadium compared to those played in the U.S.”
Ironically, it is the NFL that is throwing up the main roadblocks to legal sports wagering in the U.S., including legal challenges—all successful so far—to New Jersey’s laws authorizing sports betting in Atlantic City casinos.
While Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver and National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman have all said it is time to reexamine the federal ban on sports betting in the U.S., NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has stood firmly in his opposition to legal sports wagering, insisting it will affect the integrity of the game, even while at the same time insisting that fantasy sports leagues do not affect game integrity.
Even former NBA Commissioner David Stern came out last week to back the play of Silver, his successor. “I’m with Commissioner Silver,” Stern told an audience at a New York forum on the future of sports and digital media. “There should be federal legislation that says, ‘Let’s go all the way’ and have betting on sports. It’s OK. It’s going to be properly regulated.”
