As the US Supreme Court continues to deliberate the future of legal sports betting in the country, sports leagues have received support from an unexpected entity – the English Premier League. The league has said that it supports the National Basketball Association and the Major Baseball Leagues’s request that sports betting operators use official league data, share their customer data and pay a percentage fee of the amount that is wagered on their sports. The sports leagues have also demanded that they have an input on what type of bets operators are allowed to offer.
The official rights holder for the Premier League and professional soccer leagues in England and Scotland, Football DataCo commented on the MLB and NBA’s list of demands.
“Broadly, we don’t think what the leagues are asking for is fundamentally wrong, if you’re trying to come up with a framework that works for both parties,” noted DataCo’s Adrian Ford.
Ford said that he could not see why there would be an issue about sports getting a return from betting. “We’d echo some of the of the high-level statements the NBA has made,” he said. “If someone is making money off us, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be interested in that and why we shouldn’t have some level of involvement in the commercial return. It’s clearly not what we have here [In the UK].”
England and Scotland’s professional soccer leagues teamed up in 2001 to create Football DataCo which protects, markets and commercializes official data that is related to matches. A long battle ensued in the courts, lasting over eight years, between the company and bookmakers, after Football DataCo charged bookies for using the English Premier League fixtures. A few years after Football DataCo lost its case, it was successful against the company, Sportradar and the court granted it intellectual property rights on its database stats.
Sports leagues in the United States haven’t had the same success as Football DataCo and have lost multiple court cases surrounding the question of data rights.
