The Case Against Re-Banning Sports Betting

E ffective governance requires laws that work in the real world among imperfect people. Policies built on abstract theory, no matter how well-intentioned, often collapse under real-world conditions. The American experiment prohibiting sports betting is a perfect illustration. Rather than curtailing betting, the ban resulted in widespread law-breaking, greater risks to sports integrity, and revenue funneled into criminal enterprises. Renewed calls to restore bans risk repeating that mistake.

In 1992, Congress enacted the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), barring state-authorized sports betting. The law reflected beliefs that outlawing sports betting would contain its harms. But, in addition to violating federalist principles, PASPA was a spectacular failure. By the time the Supreme Court struck down PASPA in 2018 — with all of the conservative justices agreeing that the law unjustly commandeered state powers in its 6–3 decision — Americans were spending an estimated $150 billion a year in the illegal sports-betting market. Demand didn’t disappear. It simply became less visible.

Since legalization, visibility of sports betting has certainly increased, and stories about gambling’s ills have proliferated. Backlash has emerged from both liberal commentators concerned about public health and conservative commentators worried about civic virtue. Often, they cite the same evidence.

Such concerns are legitimate, but the evidence that legalized sports betting causes bankruptcy, destroys savings, or triggers domestic abuse is weak and often fatally flawed. Key studies rely on non-public data and produce results lacking real-world relevance, such as a 0.3 percent drop in credit scores supposedly driving bankruptcy. Research claiming a link between sports betting and domestic violence ignored away games and provided no evidence that abusers actually placed bets.

Problem gambling is perhaps the most compelling of the concerns, but the evidence complicates simple narratives. While increased access to gambling might seem to inevitably produce higher addiction rates, decades of research suggest that gambling disorder rates remain relatively stable over time despite access. Data from the U.K., where gambling has been widely available for decades, shows that gambling rates have remained at around 0.5 percent since 2012 even amid massive expansions in online gambling.

New online betting platforms may pose heightened risks for those predisposed to addiction, but they also enable new interventions to help those exhibiting addictive behavior. Digital betting platforms can identify problematic patterns of play, enforce deposit limits, and require companies to respect self-exclusion lists, which enable individuals to voluntarily block their own access to gambling sites. Such tools are difficult or impossible to implement in illegal markets but can be made mandatory in regulated markets.

More importantly, individuals struggling with addiction gain no help by having their actions criminalized. Making online sports betting illegal only adds additional risk and stigma to a behavior that already carries both.

Problems fester while society bears the cost anyway. But legal markets create pathways for those suffering with disordered gambling to seek help and fund interventions with tax revenue.

Sports integrity is another issue that demonstrates how regulation outperforms prohibition. Recent scandals, like the lifetime ban imposed by the NBA on Toronto Raptors forward-center Jontay Porter for manipulating his in-game play to profit off bets, might seem to validate fears that legal betting fuels corruption. Yet these scandals were uncovered precisely because betting now occurs in a regulated market.

Regulated sportsbooks are both financially incentivized and legally required to track betting patterns and report irregularities. That is why in most of these cases, it was sportsbooks who raised the first alarms. Illegal bookmakers have little incentive to monitor suspicious behavior and every incentive not to report it. Match-fixing did not begin with legal sports betting, but legalization created mechanisms capable of detecting it.

Legalization has also shrunk the betting illicit market that allows match-fixers to operate with little risk of detection. Industry figures suggest that as of 2023, more than 77 percent of online sports bets were placed through legal channels, compared to just 44 percent in 2019. The opaque networks that once enabled fixers to profit from corruption are steadily losing ground.

Some may prefer to return to the era when gambling and its consequences remained hidden from public view. But sweeping problems under the rug does not solve them and typically makes them worse. Legal markets allow us to identify and address harms through regulation and to fund mitigation strategies from the tax revenue they generate.

People will never be perfect, and attempts to use prohibition to change behavior typically produce far more harm than they prevent. The more prudent approach is to establish policies that encourage lawful behavior, allow harms to be measured, and use tax money from lawful businesses to mitigate those harms. The legal sports-betting market, distasteful as it may be to some, represents such an arrangement.

The choice is not between legalized gambling and a gambling-free society. Humans have gambled since the dawn of history, and it’s unlikely to disappear regardless of legality. The choice is between gambling conducted openly with oversight or more dangerous gambling conducted in the shadows. That reality may be uncomfortable for those concerned about its cultural effects. But good governance does not require approving of every activity a free society permits. It requires choosing the regulatory path that produces the best outcomes.

For conservatives who value prudence, order, consumer freedom, and consumer sovereignty, the choice to regulate rather than ban sports betting should be clear.