Jack Anderson: Time for sports fans to cash out on excesses of modern gambling

Certain -- not all -- unscrupulous, unregulated operators are only too willing to convert your late-night doomscroll into a doomspin of debt.

In the giddy build-up to the game against Czechia, the Irish media picked up on a criminal investigation in that country into 47 cases of suspected bribery and match-fixing involving an array of clubs, administrators, referees and players. 

The subtext from an Irish perspective was the hope that the Czechs might be distracted from the task at hand. They weren’t.

Match-fixing scandals in a domestic league rarely impact the national team. 

Sometimes they even galvanise them. Last autumn, the Turkish Football Federation banned 102 players and 149 match officials following their alleged involvement in betting conspiracies. 

Türkiye beat Kosovo on Tuesday and will play Australia in the first group game at the World Cup in June.

Italy probably could do with a match-fixing scandal. The four-time champions will now miss their third World Cup in a row, beaten by Bosnia-Herzegovina on penalties. 

When the Italians won in 1982, the tournament’s top scorer was their striker Paolo Rossi who two years earlier was embroiled in the Totonero match-fixing scandal. 

Rossi was initially banned for three years, later reduced to two, allowing Juventus to re-sign him in time to win the Scudetto in the 1981-82 season. 

A redeemed Rossi, via a hatrick against a beloved Brazilian team, powered Italy to the final against West Germany Italy’s most recent World Cup win came in Germany in 2006, and it took place against the backdrop of another scandal called Calciopoli which centred on the fixing of referee appointments to favour certain clubs, particularly during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons. 

Juventus were stripped of their titles and began the 2006-07 season in Serie B. In between, Italy won the World Cup with five Juve players in the starting team and a former Juve manager (Lippi) on the line.

Around the football world today, the most common example of match-fixing is where players agree to get a yellow card (for dissent, a tackle from behind etc) tipping off friends in advance so that money can be made on the betting markets. 

The latest iteration of this occurred last month in the US in Major League Soccer (MLS) where two players, Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah, were banned for life for betting on games, including their own.

Six weeks earlier MLS had signed a lucrative deal (sorry, partnership) with Polymarket, a prediction market. 

Prediction markets are essentially betting exchanges where “event contracts” are offered on whether some future outcome will occur. Each contract costs between 1 and 99 cents, paying out $1 if the event occurs and nothing if it does not.

In sports betting terms, buying a contract is putting down a stake and the 1-99 cent range is equivalent to the odds. Self-evidently, there are potentially higher returns for outcomes which the overall market deems less likely. And similar to the betting exchanges, a trader or punter can buy and sell contracts over time, as the odds fluctuate.

The corporate guff from the MLS was that the link with Polymarket would be yet another “fun” way to promote fan engagement or, as the MLS Deputy Commissioner put it at the launch, “Partnering with Polymarket allows us to integrate prediction markets as a new fan engagement format and position MLS as an early leader among global soccer properties.” Global soccer properties, gee whiz.

In reality, such partnerships are just another way to make a buck out of fans.

Prediction markets, as with any stock exchange, sporting or otherwise, are susceptible to insider trading – of which yellow card betting is an example. 

A feature of the Iran conflict is the growing evidence that some policy makers and politicians in Washington and, allegedly, family members of someone else in that town whose title begins with a P, may, knowing announcements in advance, be making a fortune on the prediction markets.

You could call this polly-fixing. Even if it is not yet strictly illegal in the US – though this week Arizona moved to shut down prediction markets as illegal gambling platforms – it is deeply unethical. Put simply, bets are being placed on the flight of a bomb. No market can measure such disregard for and detachment from humanity.

The light touch regulation of prediction markets in the US is replicated in the regulation of sports betting across the States. Since a 2018 Supreme Court decision removed prohibitions, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sport, and roughly half of men aged 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

Addiction rates have soared. Match-fixing cases have increased. American sport has been “gamblified”. With little federal interest and the coffers of individual states awash with betting levies, as is so often the case in the US, real change is left to individuals to litigate in the courts.

A case to watch started last month in the quaintly named Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. Two gamblers, Christopher Sage and Terry Thompson, are suing leading online betting apps, DraftKings and FanDuel, as well as sports organisations such as the NFL, on the grounds that exposure to such apps (especially live, in-play, micro-betting) caused their severe gambling addictions.

The claim is of interest because the lawyers supporting Sage and Thompson are taking the same approach that public interest lawyers successfully took against big tobacco, the pharma companies responsible for the US’s opioid crisis and, just last week, the cases taken against leading social media platforms such as Meta.

Common to all was the argument that the product in question (tobacco, opioid-based meds, social media apps) had design defects but were nevertheless marketed in a way that contributed to consumers becoming addicted (with all the associated social, familial and financial harm that entails). 

In addition, those successful to the tune of millions of dollars against Big Tobacco, Pharma and Tech, argued that the companies involved knew about such flaws and either denied or ignored them or failed to warn consumers about them.

Similarly, the Sage and Thompson litigation argues that betting companies have designed apps that are addictive and harmful to vulnerable punters. If the case succeeds, it will likely impact on online betting apps globally.

In Ireland, 2026 is a big year for gambling regulation with the beginning of the formal process of licensing betting providers under our new statutory regime. The Irish gambling regulator has significant powers. The question is whether they’ll be enforced. 

For example, will the regulator avail of her power under section 148 of the Gambling Act to prohibit gambling licensees from advertising material that is “likely to” give rise to or induce harm and irresponsible gambling behaviour in consumers, such as inducements involving “free” bets?

This writer and punter is not anti-gambling. I had my first bet exactly 40 years ago (and probably illegally so) on Dawn Run to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The mare, as Peter O’Sullevan so memorably put it, “got up”. 

I’ve enjoyed the odd bet ever since. But gambling today is a digital drug that we all carry in our pocket and certain (not all) unscrupulous, unregulated operators are only too willing to convert your late-night doomscroll into a doomspin of debt. It’s time to cash out on the excesses of online gambling.