David Bockino is a professor of sport management at Elon University and the author of “Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting.”
The National Football League should say outright what most viewers already know: “Gambling is good for our league.”
The perks are obvious. Betting keeps audiences engaged, boosts ratings and allows the league to charge billions of dollars for television rights. There is also the direct financial windfall from data partnerships and sponsorships, including hundreds of millions from the NFL’s three official sportsbook partners.
So why won’t the NFL acknowledge the benefits?
It’s not like Americans started gambling because of the NFL. Fans were betting long before football became a national obsession. People wagered on boxing and baseball, on horse racing and hockey. Americans have always loved betting.
Some of the people who helped build the NFL enjoyed a wager as much as anyone. Tim Mara, the founding owner of the New York Giants, was a prolific bookmaker. Pittsburgh Steelers founding owner Art Rooney was an avid bettor. Chicago Cardinals owner Charles Bidwill made a fortune printing programs and betting tickets used at horse tracks.
The NFL is a league built, in part, by gamblers with gambling money. Betting is in its DNA.
Players have known this for years. In 1969, after he was nearly suspended for owning a bar frequented by gamblers, Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath fumed about the hypocrisy of then-Commissioner Pete Rozelle: “If [Rozelle] ever succeeded in eliminating all betting on pro football, he’d also eliminate a good share of the interest in the game.”
But interest in the NFL is at an all-time high. The NFL has record-breaking audiences. Skyrocketing team valuations. An expanding global footprint. So why should the league admit anything about gambling?
Mostly because audiences are angry. Widespread legalization in the United States was too much, too soon. I talk to young sports fans all the time, and they are tired of gambling commercials, in-game money lines and commentators bantering about parlays instead of players. The discontent could hurt the league’s reputation in the long term.
Fans need an institution to guide them through this new legalized sports betting era. Politicians aren’t going to figure it out. Neither are players. The other professional leagues could and should help, but they’re not as popular as the NFL. College sports are a mess. The sportsbooks are focused on trying to stay profitable as the market becomes increasingly complicated.
So why not the NFL? The league is the most influential sports institution in the U.S. It also has as much to gain and lose with sports betting as anybody. The NFL could wield that power to take some steps forward.
A large segment of viewers wants gambling-free football coverage, and the NFL can give it to them. Some creators have already begun exploring this opportunity. If these experiments prove popular, the NFL should push broadcasters and media partners to provide more ways to engage with football without having to endure constant promotion for same-game parlays and gambling apps.
The NFL could also use this opportunity to talk directly to its youngest fans about the dangers of sports betting addiction. It already has a system it could use. For nearly two decades, the NFL has encouraged young people to get up and move with its Play 60 initiative. When it launched, Commissioner Roger Goodell said that the league was “taking a leadership role in the movement to get youngsters fit.” The NFL committed $350 million to the program in its first 10 years.
The league has taken some steps to combat problem gambling. But it should expand its outreach by emulating the well-funded, NFL-branded Play 60 model with betting: run workshops, offer additional education grants and use players to explain the dangers of addiction. Young people won’t listen to a 75-year-old senator. But they’ll listen to Josh Allen or Saquon Barkley.
If the league does decide to take on this responsibility, it needs to remember that the best leaders are fully transparent. No more dancing around the issue of gambling. No more self-righteous statements about the “integrity of the game.”
Goodell should be honest and say, “Every year, billions of dollars are wagered on our games. For the most part, that’s good for our league. It brings attention, and attention is valuable.” Then follow that up by saying, “But we know that legalized sports betting also presents new challenges. We’re launching some initiatives to address those issues. Let’s figure out how we can make this work for everybody.”
This is a win-win for the NFL: It gets to keep the attention that gambling attracts while addressing the growing discontent around the betting industry.
Of course, the first step is to say what everybody already knows.
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