How The Explosion Of Prop Betting Threatens The Integrity Of Pro Sports

John Affleck does not work for, speak with, own shares in or receive financing from any business or organization that would take advantage of this short article, and has disclosed no relevant associations beyond their academic consultation.


Penn State provides financing as a founding partner of The Conversation US.


https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.dpfyfqy6j


When I first became aware of the arrests of Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player Damon Jones in connection to federal investigations involving illegal betting, I could not assist however consider a current minute in my sports composing class.


I was revealing my students a clip from an NFL video game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Kansas City Chiefs. Near the end of play, Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence threw a perfect pass to receiver Brian Jones Jr. to protect a crucial first down. Out of the blue, a trainee groaned and stated that he 'd lost US$ 50 on that toss.


I believed of that minute since it exposed how ubiquitous sports wagering has ended up being, how much the types of bets have altered with time, and - provided these patterns - how it's naive to think gamers will not continue to be tempted to game the system.


The prop bet strikes it big


I've been following the advancement of sports betting for about a decade in my position as chair of Penn State's sports journalism program.


Back when legal American sports wagering was primarily confined to Las Vegas, the basic bets tended to be connected to selecting a winner or which group would cover a point spread.


But ahead of the 1986 Super Bowl between the Chicago Bears and the overmatched New England Patriots, gambling establishments offered bets on whether Bears defensive lineman - and occasional running back - William "Refrigerator" Perry would score a goal. The enjoyment around that sideshow kept fan interest going during a 46-10 blowout.


Perry did end up scoring, and the prop bet took off from there.


Prop bets are wagers that depend on an outcome within a game however not its last result. They can typically involve an athlete's individual performance in some analytical classification - for example, the number of yards a running back will hurry for, the number of rebounds a basketball center will protect, or the number of strikeouts a pitcher will have. They've ended up being regular offerings on sports betting menus.


For example: As I write this, I am looking at a FanDuel account I opened years earlier, seeing that, for the Green Bay Packers-Pittsburgh Steelers game currently in progress, I can place a wager on which player will score a goal, how many yards each quarterback will toss for and much, far more. As the game advances, the chances continuously shift - enabling what are called "live bets."


Going back to my trainee who lost the bet on Lawrence's pass completion: It's possible he 'd put a bet on Lawrence to throw fewer than a set variety of yards. Or he might have belonged to a fantasy league, which is likewise based on individual player .


Either method, an issue with prop bets, from an anti-corruption point of view, is that an individual can often control the result. You don't need a group of players to be in on it - which is what happened throughout the notorious Black Sox Scandal, when 8 gamers on the Chicago White Sox were implicated of conspiring with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.


In the indictment versus him, Rozier is accused of telling a co-defendant to pass along info to particular bettors that he planned to leave a March 2023 video game early - a relocation everyone involved understood meant he would not reach his analytical standards for the video game. They could then position bets that he would not hit those marks.


In baseball, meanwhile, Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians was put on leave during the 2025 season and is under examination for potentially unlawfully wagering on the result of 2 pitches he tossed. MLB authorities are basically trying to determine if he deliberately tossed balls instead of strikes in two instances. (Yes, prop bets have become so granular that you can even bank on whether a pitcher will toss a ball or a strike on a private pitch.)


A taking off market without any end in sight


The popularity of prop bets feeds into an around the world sports gambling market that has experienced explosive development and shows no sign of slowing.


Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that states could pick whether to permit sports betting, 39 states plus the District of Columbia have actually done so.


The leagues and media are more than just onlookers. FanDuel and DraftKings are official sports betting partners of the NBA and the NFL.


In the days after the Supreme Court ruling, I wondered whether journalists would accept sports betting. Nowadays, ESPN not only has a betting program, but it likewise has a wagering app.


According to the American Gaming Association, sportsbooks gathered a record $13.71 billion in revenue in 2024 from about $150 billion in wagers. A study launched in February 2025 by Siena and St. Bonaventure universities discovered that almost half of American males have an online sports wagering account.


But those figures don't start to touch the around the world sports betting market, specifically the prohibited one. The United Nations, in a 2021 report, reported that as much as $1.7 trillion is wagered annually in prohibited wagering markets.


The U.N. report cautioned that it had actually discovered a "shocking scale, manifestation, and complexity of corruption and arranged crime in sport at the global, regional, and national levels."


Who's the manager?


In early October 2025, I went to a conference of Play the Game, a Denmark-based company that promotes "democratic worths in world sports." Its periodic gatherings bring in specialists from around the world who have an interest in keeping sports fair and safe for everybody.


One of the most sobering topics was prohibited, online sportsbooks that feature wagering on all levels of sport, from the most affordable levels of European soccer on up.


It sounded somewhat familiar. This summer at the Little League World Series, which my students covered for The Associated Press, supervisors complained about overseas sportsbooks offering lines on the tournament, which is played by 12-year-old novices.


And with so much prohibited wagering on the planet, the problem of match fixing was bound to come up.


One session screened a recent German documentary on match repairing. Meanwhile, Anca-Maria Gherghel, a Ph.D. candidate at Sheffield Hallam University and senior researcher for EPIC Global Solutions, both in northern England, told me how she had actually talked to a professional female soccer gamer for a team in Cyprus. The gamer described how she and her colleagues were consistently approached with lucrative deals to toss matches.


Put all of it together - the huge sums of cash at play and the relative ease of repairing a prop bet, let alone a match - and you can not be amazed at the NBA scandal.


I utilized to believe that gambling was simply a sector of the bigger sports industry. Now, I wonder whether I had it exactly backward.