New Jersey racetracks clock win vs. pro sports leagues

New Jersey’s once beleaguered gaming industry is unquestionably the hero of the decades-long effort to bring legalized sports betting to the United States. Their battle raged on for years and was, seemingly, ended entirely when the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 back in 2018. But one battle on the New Jersey sports betting front continues to rage and that’s the legal fight between the professional sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NCAA) and the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (NJTHA).
Earlier this week, the NJTHA won a major victory over the professional sports leagues won an appeal in the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals that will likely grant them access to $34 million of the leagues’ cash. At the heart of the case is the leagues efforts to stall regulated sports betting in New Jersey after sports betting should have been legalized. A judge ordered them to post a $3.4 million bond (against potential damages to the tracks) while the battle raged on. (Though the tracks say they lost something more like $150 million in revenue.)
Now that the battle is done and New Jersey won, race track owners claim that they’re due to the income they would have earned had the leagues not stood in their way and a judge agreed. It looks as though the leagues will lose their $3.4 million (which seems a trifling amount in an industry where players and coaches routinely make that amount in a single season).
Just to prove that the NJTHA was right about how much they could have made, Monmouth Race Track has earned $28 million in sports betting revenue in its first 15 months of operation.