The efforts of the sports leagues to get money for nothing could be paying off.
The West Virginia sports betting bill, which will become effective if/when (when) the U.S. Supreme Court scraps that law that currently prevents West Virginia and most other states from adopting sports wagering, has been tweaked to provide for a so-called “integrity fee” aimed at compensating those who provide the sports on which bets are placed a piece of the action in exchange for, well, nothing.
Via WVNews.com, a tentative agreement has been reached in West Virginia to pay the integrity fee. The funds will come not from the state’s cut of the money generated by gambling, but from the portion that will go to the various state casinos where the betting will occur.
“I demanded that the entire fee be paid by the casinos,” Governor Jim Justice said.
All due respect, it’s a distinction without much of a difference. The extra money that the casinos will cough up to the sports leagues to get the deal done just as easily could have gone to sweetening the pot for the state. So even though the state’s piece of the pie will get no smaller, the fact that the casinos will get less money necessarily means that the state could have gotten more.
Instead, that money will become a windfall for sports leagues tha have gotten not a dime from legal gambling that has occurred for decades in Nevada. But since gambling likely will be happening legally in other places, the leagues now need compensation to ensure that their games will have integrity?
Of all the scams that professional sports leagues have pulled over the years on the American public, this one takes the cake. Literally. Unless the sports leagues will be licensing team names or logos for use in sports wagering (which will make everything feel more “official”), the sports leagues are providing nothing that they wouldn’t have otherwise provided for free, since the benefit to the sports leagues due to gambling arises from the increase in interest that happens when people have a financial interest in the outcome of a game.
Really, what leverage do the sports leagues have? Short of shutting down, there’s not a single thing they could have done to force West Virginia or any other state to pull a few bills off the bankroll, whether it’s given a term that sounds honorable or whether it’s called what it really is: Goodfellas-style tribute.