Lessons from the latest (alleged) millionaire match-fixers
Following betting scandals in the NBA and UFC, now two MLB pitchers are accused of manipulating prop bets for gambling benefits.
Almost three years ago to the day, Jeremy Luke, now the CEO of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, told me his biggest concerns about match-fixing / competition manipulation came from those athletes struggling to generate income from sports. Also, that manipulation was more likely to involve something as simple as paying an athlete to double fault in tennis to impact the outcome of a bet, not the outright throwing of a match.
“The higher-risk sports are certainly ones that are at a lower level, where athletes are being paid, but they don’t have the same kind of compensation that might exist for higher level athletes, and that’s a major risk factor,” Luke said at that time.
He’s still likely right on both counts – struggling athletes are still more likely to be involved — but what are we to make of yet another pro sports betting scandal involving high-paid athletes? This time, the allegations involve Cleveland Guardians Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz who, “were indicted for allegedly working with bettors to rig MLB pitch outcomes and win bettors more than $450,000,” as Geoff Zochodne wrote for Covers.
According to spotrac, Clase is the midst of a five-year, $20 million guaranteed contract that included a $2 million signing bonus. He was due to make a base salary of $6 million in 2026, but that’s up in the air now because Major League Baseball still has him on non-disciplinary leave. Though Ortiz makes much less, his $820,000 one-year salary for 2025 is still much more than most people make in a year. He’s on MLB non-disciplinary leave now, too, of course.
In terms of the NBA scandal alleged to have involved Hall of Famer and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, former player Damon Jones and current Miami Heat player Terry Rozier, they were also well-paid pros. Billups signed a two-year contract extension with the Trail Blazers at the end of the 2024-25 season in which he made $4.7 million. Jones’ last contract with the Milwaukee Bucks (from 2008-2011) was for four years and $16.1 million. Rozier signed a four-year contract worth more than $96 million in 2022 and was due to earn a base salary of more than $26.6 million this year.
The average salary of a UFC fighter is difficult to determine, so it’s tough to know how much former UFC fighter Isaac Dulgarian has earned in his career, but, for sure, it’s a lot less than all of the above.
Still, none of these are amateur athletes struggling to buy groceries and needed to, allegedly, get involved in a gambling fix to survive. But, as an aside, it does make me worry about contest manipulation in the upcoming Winter Olympics for those athletes who struggle financially. And that includes many athletes wearing the Maple Leaf, at a time where many national sport organizations are facing a funding crisis.
While I’m saddened and a little angry that those allegedly involved would do something so stupid when they, generally, aren’t short of cash, we’ll probably never really know what motivates a millionaire athlete or coach to manipulate a prop bet for what amounts to tip money in their worlds.
Perhaps an athlete’s extreme competitiveness and drive to earn as much as possible is a factor; maybe they owe certain people something; possibly they simply weren’t educated properly about the rules and dangers and consequences.
In the end, three things are clear:
1. We can no longer assume a well-paid athlete wouldn’t get involved in competition manipulation.
2. This is just the beginning of the betting scandals to come.
3. We simply must reduce and limit prop bets regardless of their popularity and how lucrative they are to operators (something that appears to be in motion). Major League Baseball announced Monday that some sportsbooks have agreed to put limits on “pitch-level markets”.
As I wrote last week, the integrity of the sports many of us love — and the foundation of all this sports betting — is now very much in question. That’s not only sad, it’s a harbinger of doom if there aren’t serious corrections from both the leagues and operators.
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Thoughts on PENN dropping ESPN and going (back) to Canada’s theScore
Everything old is new again at PENN Entertainment, which announced last week it was dropping ESPN BET after just two years as its U.S. sports betting brand partner and going back to its original online partner and Canadian subsidiary theScore.
As Tom Nightingale wrote in Canadian Gaming Business, PENN will officially drop the ESPN BET brand on Dec. 1 and rebrand its U.S. sports betting to theScore Bet, matching its sports betting operation in Ontario (and soon, Alberta).
To say PENN has had a few abysmal failures in the U.S. sports betting game is an understatement. ESPN BET never caught fire in the U.S. as hoped — and sure looked questionable being promoted beneath ESPN stories on the latest gambling scandals. It also wasn’t PENN’s first disaster in the online space.
In February of 2020, PENN acquired a 36% stake in Barstool Sports. In February of 2023, PENN bought out Barstool completely. The total cost of acquisition was reportedly $551 million. Yet, only six months later, PENN sold Barstool back to the latter’s founder, Dave Portnoy, for $1. That was around the time PENN signed a 10-year, $2 billion deal to launch ESPN BET in the U.S. – paying $150 million annually to license the brand. Oh, and we didn’t yet mention the $2 billion PENN spent to acquire theScore from the Levy family in 2021.
As Joe Pompliano wrote in his Huddle Up newsletter, “If you add up the money that PENN Entertainment has spent with Barstool Sports and ESPN over the last five years, the company has now lost more than $1.5 billion in its efforts to compete with FanDuel and DraftKings. In fact, [PENN] CEO Jay Snowden stated that Penn Entertainment sold Barstool Sports back to Dave Portnoy for $1 because he believed ESPN would give them a better chance of reaching a 20% market share.”
On last week’s conference call announcing the change back to theScore Bet in the U.S., Snowden said:
“Although we made significant progress in improving our product offering and building a cohesive ecosystem with ESPN, we were unable to establish ESPN BET as a scale player. It is the right time to realign our interactive focus, prioritizing our digital assets in Canada and our Hollywood iCasino product to further leverage our core retail casino business and overall omnichannel business model. This shift emphasizes cross-sell opportunities across our ecosystem and enhances connectivity with our 33 million-plus PENN Play customer database… theScore Bet, which, as you know, has been delivering strong results for years in Ontario, one of North America’s largest and most competitive online markets. Aaron LaBerge and his best-in-class team are currently working on a seamless customer experience that includes the current app being automatically updated to theScore Bet when you open it on the date of transition. All account information, balances, betting history, pending bets, marketing offers and promotions transfer over automatically. There will be no new app to download or new registration process to go through.
“Lastly, the transition to theScore Bet will present an opportunity to optimize our digital business and operate more efficiently, including replacing fixed media spends with performance-based and regionally targeted marketing that complement our retail and iCasino footprint.”
Here is the bright spot for Canada and, potentially, PENN with yet another head-turning branding decision: In Ontario, theScore Bet is, reportedly, much more successful vis-à-vis its many competitors than ESPN BET was in the U.S. Perhaps there are good lessons for PENN from its Ontario experience.
Also, Toronto-based theScore runs the tech for the platform – and always did run the tech for ESPN BET. That could be a good news story in terms of Canadian jobs, especially after PENN cut half of theScore’s editorial workforce (about 75 people) in June from the Toronto office.
We’ll have more on this story when John Levy joins us on the next episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming.
Canadian Lottery Coalition seeks next executive director
With apologies to Erich Maria Remarque, all’s been relatively quiet on the Canadian Lottery Coalition front since July. That’s when a Manitoba judge explained his reasons for issuing a sweeping injunction against Bodog the province of the Jets and Blue Bombers.
That ruling was seen as a significant win for the coalition, representing the Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries Corporation, Atlantic Lottery, Loto-Québec and BCLC. MBLL took legal action on behalf of the coalition, urging Court of King’s Bench of Manitoba Judge Jeffrey Harris to ban Bodog - an offshore sports betting and gaming operator - from doing business in the province.
We learned at the end of last week that former OLG/Sightline Payments senior executive Will Hill, who joined the coalition as its executive director in September 2023, left the contract position at the end of September. In an email to Gaming News Canada, Hill confirmed his departure and declined to comment further. We reached out to the coalition’s PR agency to ask if Hill - who spoke about the coalition’s mandate during an April 2024 appearance on the Gaming News Canada Show - was being replaced and we received this email response Monday on behalf of the coalition:
“We can confirm that Mr. Hill’s contract expired at the end of September, and we are grateful for the work he did in elevating the issue of illegal online sports betting during his time at the Coalition. The coalition continues to undertake the important work of its members and will announce our new leadership in due course.”
More on prop bets from Handigraphs co-founders on a new GNCS
Speaking of what to do about prop bets, on a new episode of the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, Adam Rosenberg and CJ Buskey spoke to host Steve McAllister about them.
Rosenberg – whose work in the gaming industry prior to becoming a branding, communications and marketing consultant included stops at The Action Network and Better Collective – provided some thoughts and layers on the push in some corners to ban prop betting in the regulated North American industry.
It was all a part of a conversation about the pair offering a slew of new NHL data via their company Handigraphs, a project that came to life over their shared for spreadsheets and sports analytics.
Listen to the show or watch it on our YouTube channel:
People on the Move
News landed Tuesday morning that Lord Jon Mendelsohn is leaving his role as Chair of Evoke, owners of William Hill and 888.
Kyle Sauers is promoted to President at Rush Street Interactive and keeps his Chief Financial Officer title.
Konstantinos Farris is named Chief Executive Officer of Intralot.
Mohegan Gaming CEO Ray Pineault will be leaving the operator on December 28.
Former Barclays head honcho John Ott will begin his new duties later this month as Chair of The Rank Group.
Graham Greensmith is the new Chief Commercial Officer at Swedish business Gaming Corps.
Shaan Devaraj is named Chief Technology Officer at Xpoint.
Nathan Busscher joins ProphetX as Chief Product Officer.
Former BetCo. Sports/Betfred/Sporting Group guy Adam Varey joins ALT Sports Data as Senior Director of Trading Operations.
Reid Holland is appointed Global Digital Media Director at Clarion Gaming.
Degen Studios names Danny Gordon its Head of Studio.
Kevin Mullally steps down as Chief Executive of UAE’s General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority.
After almost 13 years at Better Collective, including the past 30 months as Senior Director – Group Content & Digital Performance – Guillaume Mazella is bidding adieu to the company.
Zach Wolf comes on board at Underdog as Senior Data Scientist.
Steven Williamson announces on LinkedIn he will be leaving LeoVegas at year’s end after five-plus year in the company’s compliance department.
The Hockey News head honcho Graeme Roustan is appointed Chair and CEO at True Sports ULC.
John Delaney departs Canucks Sports & Entertainment and is appointed Vice President, Digital at IMG.
Zvi Zatan joins the Canadian Football League as Manager, Global Partnerships.
Jeff Elia leaves the Ontario Hockey League’s Brantford Bulldogs to come the Director, Corporate Partnerships and Business Development at the league office. The league also appoints Tracy Robert as Manager of Culture and Community.
Sportsnet golf reporter Adam Stanley is adding the Ottawa bureau to his duties with the network.
Joseph Casciaro, formerly of theScore, joins Sportsnet as a Web Editor.
Classified (Jobs) Information
On the Home Front
Betty is searching for a Vice President, Creative Strategy.
OLG is on a seek-and-employ mission for a Director, Player Risk Monitoring & Intervention, Safer Gambling.
Entain has an opportunity with its Sports Interaction offices in Toronto for a CRM Executive.
Wanted by the Responsible Gambling Council: a Brand Marketing Specialist.
Lotteries & Gaming Saskatchewan is in the market for a Director of Cybersecurity.
Atlantic Lottery has opportunities for a Director, AML & Compliance Operations, a Technical Service Representative, and a Data Analyst.
Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries Corporation has an opening for a Program Manager, Risk Management.
Legend/Covers is looking for a Senior Manager, Betting Content.
FINTRAC is in the market for a Senior IT Security Analyst.
Bet99 is searching for a Senior Data Engineer.
Canucks Sports & Entertainment has an opening for a Director, Broadcast.
Toronto agency T1 is in the market for a Project Manager, Strategy and Creative.
North Pole Hoops is seeking a Social Media Marketing Strategist.
The Canadian Paralympic Committee is searching for an Officer, Executive Office & Operations.
Canada Soccer is in the market for a Manager of Coach Education, Member Services.
The Canadian Sport Institute – Ontario has an opening for a Senior Manager, Marketing & Business Development.
The Globe and Mail is looking for an Investment Reporter.
South of the Border
The National Football League has an opening for a Director, Global Sports Betting.
ESR Talent is on the lookout for two senior gaming industry marketing pros.
Davis Catlin and the folks at Discerning Capital have need for a Head of Finance & Operations.
Hard Rock Digital requires a Director – Sportsbook Commercial Partnerships, an Analyst – Trading Real Time, a Senior Product Manager/Producer – Slots, and a Production Designer – Awareness.
Rush Street Interactive has need of a Marketing Operations Specialist at its Collingswood, NJ, offices.
BetMGM has a remote opening for a Senior Data Scientist to support its New Jersey operation.
There’s an opportunity at Are You Watching This? for a Customer Success Manager.
GamesBeat is searching for a Branded Content Lead.
The Florida Gaming Control Commission requires a Senior Attorney.
Fanatics is in the market for a Director, Partnerships – Fanatics Events.
Front Office Sports is in need of a Social Analyst.
Speedo is looking for a Global Vice President of Design.
MLS is searching for a Director, Intelligence & Investigations.
In LA, Wasserman is hiring a Director, Production.
The Chicago Bulls are seeking a Creative Strategist, Partnership Strategy & Insights.
The Nashville Predators have an opening for a Manager, Community Relations.
The Denver Post is looking for a Sports Editor.
USA Today has an opportunity for an NFL Editor – USA Today Sports Network.
The Athletic requires a Video Operations Manager.
The San Francisco 49ers are in the market for a Manager, Performance Marketing.
Across the Ponds
Paddy Power is hiring in Dublin a Head of Games Marketing.
EA Sports has a quartet of job opportunities.
IGT PlayDigital is promoting a plethora of postings.
In the UK, Hard Rock Digital needs a Senior Manager – Trading Origination.
Entain is on the lookout for an Engineering Manager.
In Malta, TheLotter is in the market for an SEO Specialist.
Xtremepush is hiring an Account Manager.
Everi has an opening in Chennai for a Lead Software Engineer.
PointsBet has an opportunity in Melbourne for a Junior Data Scientist.
Low6 has a remote opening in the UK for a React Native Developer.
ComeOn Group is seeking a Data Engineer in Malta.
Games Global requires an International Tax Manager in South Africa.
Reading and Reflection
Jay Caspian Kang, writing for The New Yorker, asked if gambling is truly threatening the integrity of sports.
And Globe and Mail columnist Cathal Kelly addressed the impact of a legal sports betting environment on tracking rigged wagers.
Mark Keast, reporting for Casino.org, spoke with PointsBet Canada’s casino lead Brooke Hilton about the impact of the operator’s recent acquisition by Japanese company MIXI.
In his excellent Straight to the Point dispatch, Steve Ruddock wrote about the “runaway train” that is the current gaming landscape in the U.S. of A.
DraftKings boss Jason Robins did the Q and A thing with Jeff Edelstein of InGame.
All of the PM talk hasn’t been helpful to the share prices of DK and FanDuel stocks.
Tom Nightingale reported for Canadian Gaming Business on the delay of Kambi launching OLG’s new Proline platform until 2026.
Nightingale also has a good piece on Great Canadian Entertainment selling six of its nine B.C.-based casinos to First Nations groups over the past 18 months.
The results from a new study out of the UK show that people with a gambling problem are more likely to die by suicide.
On ESPN.com, Dan Wetzel suggests the U.S. federal government can play an important role in deterring the folks involved in messing with the integrity of sport.
YouTube has updated its policy around the use of gambling content.
Genius Sports CEO Jeremy Locke says the company is keeping an open mind when it comes to prediction markets.
On the other hand, the chief executive officer of finance titan Schwab isn’t a fan of “blending” sports wagering and investing.
A new poll by the American Gaming Association suggests that half of all Amarican adults over the age of 21 have visited a casino during the past 12 months.
Elliotte Friedman, in his always-excellent 32 Thoughts column on Sportsnet.ca, reported last week that the NHL is reopening its investigation into allegations of gambling by player Arthur Kaliyev.
The Vegas Golden Knights are getting together with gaming industry supplier Everi on a digital wallet offering for its fans.
In its latest PR initiative, Kalshi ponied up for a U.S.-wide poll with voters around prediction markets.
Covers guy Ryan Butler reported on the potential impact of Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s win last week on the gambling landscape in New Jersey.
Meanwhile in New York, a legislator is seeking to prohibit some sports event contracts.
Alvise Armellini of Reuters took a look at the betting boom in Italy.
Another half-dozen U.S. college hoops players have been sidelined for betting violations.
Mike de Graaf, the Chief Compliance Officer for BetComply, makes the case for keeping online gaming products innovation inside the regulated gambling landscape.
Odditt, which was the focus of our interview with founder Matt Bresler in mid-August on the Gaming News Canada Show presented by Bede Gaming, unveiled its new Betflow platform on Monday.
No surprise here, as Roblox’s stock has taken a kick in the solar plexus after its latest financials were released.
For followers of all things sports media, Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder got into the negative vibes around ESPN these days. And that would include a solitaire app that’s been promoted by Stephen A. Smith and other ESPN talent facing legal trouble.
The departing chair of an Australian media company is calling for compensation if gambling ads are banned.
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