Calvin Ridley, Ivan Toney, Sandro Tonali, Jontay Porter, and…Shohei Ohtani? With the national legalization of sports betting in May of 2018, there has been a large increase in the number of gambling-related suspensions among professional athletes across the world. You may recognize some of the aforementioned names for these popular athletes who are arguably the best players on their respective teams. These names are just a handful of the dozens of athletes who have been suspended, or even banned, from their sport due to betting (often on their own team), causing multiple cases of supposed match fixing. Match fixing takes place when a player or referee rigs the game or a specific statline to make sure that a certain bet hits, usually giving whoever fixed the game a big payout. The current rules for professional athletes state that betting on any game within their respective league is illegal, as well as placing bets at any team’s facility or while traveling. Relaying information about a game that a player may be involved in is also prohibited among athletes, both professional and in college.
Through all this, you may notice that there is an outlier in this list: Shohei Ohtani has not yet been suspended or banned from the MLB despite his participation in sports gambling. Instead, his good friend and interpreter Ippei Mizuhara has been fired and arrested for allegedly stealing over $16 million from Ohtani to cover for his lost bets. Many have begun to speculate the legitimacy of this story and hypothesize that perhaps the culprit of these transactions was not Mizuhara, but Ohtani himself. These allegations come with good reasoning as the question of how Mizuhara got his hands on over $40 million in the first place remains unknown, but there is no solid evidence to prove any of these claims thus far.
When the Supreme Court lifted the ban on sports betting in 2018, many state governments were quick to jump on the train, and as of May 2024, a total of 38 states legalized some sort of betting. A great deal of fans are happy about this since they can place bets on their favorite players and teams to make a few quick bucks. However, it is starting to become a problem when their favorite players do the same.
Professional basketball player Jontay Porter both relayed information to betters and bet a sum of money on his own team. The information given led to Porter practically faking an injury mid-game so his friends could hit a payout of over $1.1 million. This huge sum of money and Porter’s strange “injury” required the NBA to investigate the situation and led to Porter later being banned for life, the first ban to this extent in all of professional sports since the legalization of sports betting.
Was the legalization of betting on professional sports a great idea? Definitely not, as we’re seeing the negative effects of its popularity on numerous professionals, who are risking their entire careers for just a couple thousand dollars. More importantly, it must be noted that betting has taken spotlight over other major issues in professional sports such as sexual assault and abuse. That being said, it is worth asking why these millionaire athletes are taking part in sports betting to begin with.
