Placing bets on sports has been one of the highest-grossing gambling activities to date, with $2.6 billion being bet on sports outcomes in 2009 in Nevada, the only state in which such sports-related wagers are legal in the United States. All of this money being spent on sports gambling has led to a significant increase in the outside influences that may go in to a particular sports outcome. And these days, it’s not just the specific outcome of a particular game on which bets are being placed; “exotic” wagers are being placed much more widely than in the past, bets that are based on specific plays or occurrences in a game.
Take the Super Bowl, for example. Bets on the final score of the game represent just a portion of the total wagers placed on this particular event, the climax of America football season. Online bookies offer odds on just about anything, from total points, to who would score the first touchdown, to what color Gatorade would be poured over the winning coach’s head. And increasingly, outsiders can easily manipulate the outcomes of these unique wagers.
Sudden exposure of young, impressionable athletes to sudden wealth, fame, and temptation is seen as the leading cause of corruption in many worldwide sports such as cricket and soccer. Several members of the Pakistani cricket team have been accused of conniving with bookies to cause particular occurrences in games, if not to lose specific matches entirely. In another case, a soccer team claiming to be from Togo arrived to play what was to be a friendly match in Bahrain, which they lost 3-0. Togolese authorities say the fixture had nothing to do with them. For some reason, however, this growing shadow that is being cast over sports-relating gambling throughout the rest of the world has not reached America quite as seriously.
One reason this could be is that foreign gambling syndicates are less interested in baseball and American football than in those sports such as soccer and tennis that are played worldwide. Another explanation is that corruption in gambling has opened the eyes of Americans to its dangers, subsequently resulting in more caution being taken by both gamblers and athletes who do not want to find themselves in the middle of a huge gambling scandal.
Professional American athletes who participate in sports gambling are subject to serious disciplinary measures, including suspension and fines, and these consequences appear to be effective deterrents. Another factor that may contribute to the lack of match fixing in American sports is the pay. In the case of the Pakistani cricket players, their annual salaries made them much more susceptible to bribes than American athletes, whose annual pay is more than ten times the amount of the Pakistani athletes.
As a result of the lessons learned by the rest of the world regarding sports gambling and match-fixing, the American sports leagues have been able to avoid the corruption and influence that sports gambling can bring – for now.
