Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Gambling on sports is now legal in almost forty states in the US. The Supreme Court paved the way for this in twenty eighteen, and since then, betting has become a big business. Football is American's favorite sport to watch, and it has been by a wide margin for more than half a century now. On Thanksgiving in twenty twenty three, more than thirty four million people on average tuned into the NFL's three games.
That was a record breaking audience. Tomorrow's slate of games is poised to break this record anew In recent years, the National Football League has gone all in on gambling on broadcasts, in stadiums and online. Jason Kelly, who hosts the Bloomberg podcast The Deal with Alex Rodriguez, says the NFL's embrace of betting and fantasy football is having a huge impact on the game.
What is so interesting is it's changed the economics for literally everyone involved.
It's a boon for the league and for sports betting sites. Many fans are following the game in a new way. Pregame shows have shifted their focus. They're about odds as much as wins and losses, and Jason says sports betting has changed the game itself in many ways and what life is like for players. They're the product.
They're the product that's being bet on, you know, week after week, day, day by day, and in minutia that they probably never could have imagined.
Was happening, and that, Jason says, is both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, there's this massive opportunity for more revenue and more attention. On the other side, there's a dark side that we know about to sports betting, which can be very personal and potentially dangerous.
Jason says he wanted to hear from pro football players themselves elves about this moment of transition to get a sense of how they feel being at the center of this new industry. So he sat down with several athletes who are trying to figure out where there's opportunity, what they can do, and what they can't. River Craycraft is a veteran wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins.
It has struck fear into me when it comes to sports betting. I don't fully know the ins and outs of what I am and what I am not allowed to do.
I'm David Gera, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today. On the show, how the normalization of betting culture is impacting pro football and the athletes who play it. Bloomberg's Jason Kelly knew he wanted to hear from a range of NFL players about the impact sports betting is having on professional football, so he reached out to some who are newly pro, others who are mid career, who have played for two or three teams, and who's
recently retired. But Jason says lining them up wasn't easy.
Well, what's interesting, David, is not everybody wanted to talk about this. In fact, there are a bunch of players and reps that I called or like, yeah, my guy's not going to go anywhere near talking about sports betting.
What makes this a sensitive subject is how much is at stake. One misstep and an NFL player could be suspended.
The basics are, if you're an NFL player, if you're an active NFL player or associated with an NFL team, you cannot bet on football. You certainly can't bet on your own team, full stop. And so they're hyper aware of what they can and can't say and what they can say is actually very limited.
You know.
One of the people we interviewed, River Craycraft, who's a wide receiver for the Dolphins, was talking about sort of the written rules and the unwritten rules. You know, the written rules are very clear.
Some of the things around gambling are you don't want to do it in the facility, you don't want to do it at any team functions or anywhere. Basically that includes the NFL. For example, being at your house by would be a place that you could do it. So those are some of the written rules versus the unwritten rules, which is kind of like speaking out on so and so I was going to do this this week to the media. Perhaps.
Jason says the growth of sports betting is making life tricky for pro players like Greatkraft. It's posing all kinds of new challenges.
He's getting text messages and calls and he sort of has to say to people, It's like, come on, man.
I have friends all the time who we'll reach out who are placing bets and stuff and asking me questions about you know, who's scoring this week and who's scoring that week, And like I said, I'm so scared. I can't respond to these guys. And some of these guys are my best friends, and I just got to tell them, like, hey, you know the deal.
Jason also spoke with Julius Thomas, recently retired All Pro tight end who played for the Denver Broncos, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Miami Dolphins.
I think about all the friends and all the people in my life that would send me a text like, you know, blunt, hey are you playing? I need to know? And you had to think about what can I say? How can I be coy about this? How do I create these boundaries.
It's a mix of the ambiguity of how a player is supposed to operate in this new environment where betting is so clearly such a big deal, and the potential penalties that can be stressful for NFL players.
The punishment is severe enough for these guys, and many of them said it that it is just not worth going near it at all because of the loss of wages and the loss of opportunity.
Jason says to keep in mind that careers in the NFL are generally pretty short. The average career is just about three and a half years long in twenty twenty two, Calvin Ridley, a star wide receiver, was suspended for a year for betting on NFL games. He's now back playing for the Tennessee Titans. Dolphins player to Ron Armstead says punishments like that loom large as players navigate their limits.
You see a great player going for a year, not anything injury related, not anything health related. It's a shock and it's scary.
Sports betting's large scale normalization has led to a cultural sea change in professional sports, especially football, and aside from the risks it poses for players, Armstead says, it's also shifting the way fans engaged with the game with downsides and benefits.
People are getting more and more invested and kind of getting away from teams and favorite players. They're going where you know their advantages are, and I get it. But I like the fact that it gives you something to watch and you're hoping for and you're staying an entire game and hopes for you coming out positive on your bet. So I love that aspect of it for sure. I love the attraction that it brings.
Coming up the challenges NFL players face in the new world of pro football. Julius Thomas was a tight end who played for the Denver Bronco and the Jacksonville Jaguars. He moved to the Miami Dolphins before he retired in twenty eighteen. Now, Thomas is getting his doctorate at Nova Southeastern University. As the world of sports betting grows, Thomas says he thinks most people don't understand how the industry has shifted fans relationships to players.
When fantasy football started to take off and so many people started to be individually invested in your job performance on a week and week out basis, it was really challenging for me. And you have people coming up to you at restaurants at grocery stores and saying, oh, why didn't you guys throw the ball enough? Or why didn't you catch more passes? Why don't you have more touchdowns? To the point where I started to even isolate myself. I would only go to the grocery store at night.
I didn't want to go spend time in the local downtowns because I knew I was going to be bombarded and I was going to be having to deal with that kind of stuff.
Today, you can bet on almost every aspect of the game. Sports betting sites like draft can encourage parlays, a cumulative series of bets in which gamblers can potentially win big even while betting small. This leads to fans, particularly ones on social media, taking issue with moments that are small bordering on insignificant, that have little to no impact on the final score. Jason says. The players he talked to resent any implication they're not giving it there all during a game.
So this notion that someone could say they were not working as hard as they could it really sort of cuts to the heart of I think their pride and sense of self.
Jason says. Players noted how social media is littered with rude, crass, and downright mean spirited messages directed at them, and how much they're costing gamblers.
I don't know if anyone has really figured out, including the NFL or these individual teams, how to truly protect players.
The pros Jason talk to recognize that now that betting is legal, it's not going anywhere.
They seem to be pretty convinced that this is here to stay.
The collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFL Players Association doesn't expire until twenty thirty, but Jason expects betting will be front and center when that contract gets negotiated in a few years.
Listen, today's players are much more aware than they were twenty thirty, certainly forty fifty years ago, of the massive economics underneath this game, especially this game the NFL. I mean, this is the big daddy of them all in terms of professional leagues. They read the same headlines, they know the billions and billions that are going in, and they're going to continue to argue to get their fair share of it.
Something that could change is what kind of relationship pro football players are allowed to have with the betting industry. Right now, it's limited.
They in the NFL, unlike in other leagues, are prohibited from having business relationships with the bet companies, which is not the case in some of the other leagues. So, for instance, Lebron James is an ambassador for DraftKings. That's totally allowed in the NBA, not allowed in the NFL.
The league, proponents of sports betting, and the players recognize that there is an upside to all this money changing hands.
One of the things that is very clear about what betting has done, Betting and fantasy have done, is it has raised the level of interest in games that you or I, as a fan of a certain team, might not have been interested in before.
But the notion of fandom is changing as a result, some fans who are betting on football are more interested in individual performance than in the game itself.
And so it does create sort of a different kind of tension, and it takes away arguably some of the spirit of why we love sports so much, which is we want our team to win. It does sort of take away some of the romance to some extent of a march to the playoffs if you're really just rooting for a team, because all of a sudden you're sort of rooting for your fantasy team or your betting portfolio.
I don't know, maybe I'm being like old man nostalgic here, but like I remember a day where you just wanted your team to win.
Thanks for listening to the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode was produced by Alex Sigura, who also mixed in. It was edited by Stacy Vanick Smith and Aaron Edwards. It was fact checked by Adriana Tapia. Naomi shaven Is our senior producer, Elizabeth Ponso is our senior editor. Nicole Beamster bor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. Helps new
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