In an address at this week’s Global Gaming Expo, former NBA Commissioner David Stern voiced his support for end to the US prohibition on sports betting.
Stern’s support for a regulated US sports betting industry is a big boost for proponents of regulated sports betting and it came with a major dose of common sense. In his remarks, Stern told the crowd that it’s time to stop ignoring the fact that the prohibition isn’t stopping anyone from actually betting on professional and amateur sports saying:
It’s everyplace around us, but we were going to pretend it doesn’t exist. It just is not a sensible place to be and the best way to approach it is to handle it with the right kind of regulatory screening that accounts for all of the concerns.
The Commissioner Emeritus also expressed his support for a regulated system that’s driven by the technology and gaming sectors, not necessarily by the professional sports leagues.
That said, Stern does not – according to the Las Vegas Review Journal – mean that PAPSA should be repealed. He thinks it needs to be amended in order to give individual states more flexibility in the matter.
Stern also expressed the idea that most Americans don’t really understand what regulated sports betting looks like because they’ve never really seen it up close:
Given what the casinos have to deal with in terms of their financial regulation and compliance laws, there’s an extraordinary amount that I think that the sports leagues and the industry together could wind up having a serious regulatory ability to make (oversight) even stronger to protect integrity.
Besides regulation adding integrity, Stern suggested that professional sports leagues would open new revenue streams if they sold their data to sports books.