Tom Minear: US betting scandals a wake-up call for Australia

A series of scandals has renewed debate over the belated US decision to legalise sports betting, and Tom Minear argues it should jolt Australia into action as well.

Opinion: Because sports betting was legalised in Australia before I was born, I gave little thought to that decision until I moved to the US, where an effective ban was only lifted in 2018.

Fans here have not grown up like I did being bombarded by the odds at stadiums and on TV. So did the Supreme Court make the right decision?

There was a sound argument for it. Americans were already illegally gambling $US150bn ($A230bn) a year on sports. Creating an authorised industry enabled protections for punters and integrity measures for the codes.

Baseball star Shohei Ohtani has been embroiled in a betting scandal in the US. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

That makes sense to me. But the US is now starting to comprehend the other consequences that critics warned of at the time – and which Australia has slowly tried to combat.

Legalising betting makes it a legitimate part of the sports we love. In turn, it creates incentives that almost inevitably corrupt the reasons we love them. Here’s some examples from the past month alone.

The NBA launched an investigation into Jontay Porter, a bench player for the Toronto Raptors whose poor statistics generated unusually big returns for punters in several games.

Cleveland Cavaliers coach JB Bickerstaff revealed he was constantly harassed by gamblers sending “crazy messages about where I live and my kids”.

On the eve of the March Madness college basketball tournament, Temple University’s team was probed over suspicious betting on the size of one of its losses.

Cleveland Cavaliers coach JB Bickerstaff has been harassed by punters. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the greatest baseball player ever, fired his translator and accused him of stealing $US4.5m to pay off his betting debts.

In a mysterious twist, Ohtani only made that allegation after he and his translator said the star willingly paid the bookmaker himself.

Amid all this drama, the NBA announced it would build live odds into its streaming service, in what a league executive called a “really good first step” towards in-game micro-betting.

And America’s betting giants announced that for the first time, they would share information about problem punters in a new responsible gambling body. It only took them six years.

That is the point. Legalising betting has made the lure of profits – for fans, leagues, broadcasters and probably even athletes – more appealing than harm minimisation.

There’s no going back now, and I am not arguing that the US or Australia should.

But as the Albanese government dithers over the prospect of new restrictions on gambling advertising, recent events in America should jolt its ministers into action.

Originally published as Tom Minear: US betting scandals a wake-up call for Australia