Every four years, the FIFA World Cup reminds us why soccer is the world’s most popular sport with billions of fans tuning in to watch the world’s best players compete on the sport’s biggest stage. With the growth of legal online sports betting, we’re also reminded of that popularity.
Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of FanDuel, has said, “we’re expecting theWorld Cup to be the biggest betting event of all time given the extended format as well as the benefit of it being partly hosted in our key market, the U.S.,” Meanwhile, DraftKings has said “we’ve seen a 5x increase in handle compared to the 2022 World Cup.”
But one underdiscussed lesson from the World Cup is that legal, regulated online sports betting has become one of the most effective tools for protecting the integrity of sports.
The world’s most beautiful sport, unfortunately, has a difficult past. For decades, leagues around the world have battled corruption schemes designed to manipulate outcomes, influence betting markets, and undermine fan confidence in the game. Major scandals include the 2006 Italian “Calciopoli” scandal, where referees gave Juventus favorable results, recent widespread match-fixing investigations across Turkish football, and the Chinese Super League corruption crackdown that resulted in lifetime bans and criminal prosecutions for China’s former national team coach and 73 players.
Criminal actors target sports where they believe they can operate in the shadows. After all, law enforcement cannot investigate what they cannot see, and illegal operators are unlikely to go to the authorities if they sense foul play.
Legal operators, on the other hand, have every incentive to report unusual and potentially criminal activity. The best defense against corruption in the game is provided by the transparency put in place by a legal, regulated system.
This truth became clear just weeks before the World Cup, when an Ivory Coast player became the subject of a betting-related investigation in France after unusual wagering activity was detected surrounding a yellow card he received. French authorities became involved after the league was alerted by betting-monitoring partners who identified those suspicious patterns.
Regulated betting markets create digital records, monitoring systems, and reporting requirements that help investigators spot potential misconduct before it spreads. This kind of monitoring is only possible because regulated betting markets create transparency and accountability.
America’s system of legal, regulated online sports betting has these monitoring systems in place as well. Earlier this year, Major League Soccer received suspicious betting alerts through integrity partners, triggering an investigation that uncovered serious violations of league gambling policies and resulted in the ban of two players.
Some will point to recent betting scandals as evidence that legal sports betting is a problem. In reality, these cases show the system is working. Suspicious activity was identified, investigated, and those responsible were held accountable.
Simply put, without the legal, regulated online sports betting industry, this activity almost certainly would have gone unnoticed. Neither offshore illegal sportsbooks nor local bookmakers offer these safeguards. They do not share betting data with leagues. They do not generate suspicious activity alerts. They do not help investigators identify potential match-fixing schemes. They are not accountable to regulators, maintain few transparency requirements, and often operate beyond thereach of American law enforcement. These illegal platforms are precisely the types of opaque markets that criminal actors prefer.
Legal, regulated online sportsbooks offer more benefits than identifying integrity issues. Most Americans who engage with sports betting do so responsibly and use it as a form of entertainment, similar to other leisure or entertainment activities. However, some users’ gambling activity can become disordered. Legal sportsbooks provide responsible gaming tools such as deposit limits, spending controls, self-exclusion programs, time-out features, and age verification designed to help consumers bet responsibly. Offshore, illegal platforms offer none of these tools and resources.
Finally, legal sports betting generates an estimated $14 billion in tax revenue each year that states have used to support education, infrastructure, public safety, and other community priorities. Bets made with unregulated sportsbooks cost states roughly $13 billion in tax revenue lost every year.
Fans have always found ways to bet on sports, especially during an exciting, captivating global event like the World Cup. The real policy question today is whether that betting occurs in regulated markets that prioritize transparency, consumer protection, and sports integrity or in illegal offshore markets that operate beyond the reach of regulators and law enforcement. Match-fixing thrives in darkness. The World Cup is a reminder that legal, regulated sports betting helps bring it into the light.
Joe Maloney is the President of the Sports Betting Alliance, whose members include FanDuel, DraftKings, Fanatics Betting & Gaming, bet365 and betMGM
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