Allow Professional Athletes to Gamble On Their Own Sports

End the duplicity.

The other day, I was reading an article about an athlete being investigated for illegal sports gambling.

The article had an ad for DraftKings.

Gambling on sports has been around for… well since sport was invented. Now that prominent sportsbooks are advertising in the light of day, the question becomes:

How do we reconcile the duplicity of professional sports leagues’ promotion of gambling while ensuring athletes are not corrupted?

The existing solution is a hodgepodge of regulations and honor codes, which are difficult to enforce.

The Solution: Rip the band-aid off. Allow athletes to bet on their own sports, with a catch.

What’s the catch?

They need to publicly disclose their bets, which would be registered with their league or would be made public through a partner (hell, why not have DraftKings do it?).

Public disclosure — with heavy punishments for anything that goes undisclosed — would allow the market (or court of public opinion) to resolve most issues which are hard to enforce otherwise.

Would they be able to bet against their teams?

Yes, but why would they? Can you imagine an athlete trying to get away with that?

What if athletes conspired?

This could happen, but public disclosure would allow for more investigation.

What are the opportunities?

I think prop bets would benefit the most. Imagine if a star player in the NBA bet he’d score 35+ points and his team would win the next game against a rival. That’s a show of confidence, which would add extra intrigue to the game. Prop bets could even add some energy to non-rivalry games.

Or what if a star defender said he’d ensure a star player on the other team scores fewer than 15 points. That would be incredible!

Isn’t this just a slippery slope? Wouldn’t this just accelerate corruption?

First off, the “slippery slope” argument is lazy in most cases. Anything could lead to anything else. In reality, changes implemented with reasonable precautions usually end up being fine in the end.

Second, the cat is already out of the bag with gambling. Even puritan states like Massachusetts allow sports betting. If it’s supposed to be “fun” (instead of what it actually is: state-sponsored addiction feeding which can ruin lives faster than alcohol or drugs), then let it be fun and public.