For the first time ever, the four commissioners of major professional sports leagues in North American sat together on one stage at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan. It was on this stage that the commissioner for the NBA, Adam Silver, reiterated his support for legalized sports gambling. This was in sharp contrast to the other three commissioners for MLB, NHL and NFL who either remained silent on the subject or adopted a vague wait-and-see approach.
“I think the NBA may be a little unique among leagues in that’ve embraced sports betting outside of the United States,” said Silver. “We’re a very popular betting property in Europe, for example, and I hear Gary [Goodell, commissioner for the NFL] about the notion of sports fans more focused on a spread and not necessarily their team winning, but I think the research generally shows fans are fairly sophisticated and that they can both root for their team and virtually all of the action.”
“You get the direct data from those betting companies, and about 85 percent of the action is now so-called in-play,” explained Silver. “People don’t have the attention spans they used to. It’s not as if they want to bet the Knicks and then wait for three hours to see what happens. They want to bet throughout the game, so they’re betting on quarter scores, on particular players, on free throws and everything else, and independent of whatever revenue stream comes from licensing our intellectual property to those gaming companies, it results in enormous additional engagement in fans.”
Adam Silver predicted that the law would change in the next few years in the United States regarding sports betting, saying that leagues had to become more realistic. He said that sports betting was a multi hundred billion dollar illegal industry in the US. As such, he said, as owners of the intellectual property, leagues had to embrace sports betting and make sure that their integrity was being protected at the same time.
Silver shared a stage with Rob Manfred of the MLB, who said that he was skeptical about the potential influence of gamblers on the outcome of baseball games, and NHL’s Gary Bettman. Roger Goodell from the National Football League remained mainly silent during the talks about legal sports betting in America.
