Why has the US been so slow to introduce legal gambling?

It seems hard to believe but only in the past year has the USA been beginning to make betting on sports legal. There had been legalized gambling with casinos and at racetracks but if you wanted to place a bet on the NFL or NBA, then you had to find other ways of doing that. So, why has it taken the USA so long to do this?

For many years the situation had been that it was a federal decision on whether each of the states could legalize and regulate gambling. This left individual states who were keen on legalizing the activity simply unable to do so.

It was the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act that had barred sports gambling. There were a few exceptions, but you had to go to Nevada to be able to place bets on the results of a single match.

It’s not the case that state legislators are all in love with gambling. They are more in love with the amounts of revenue that they could be receiving via the issuing of licenses and taxing gambling, especially the best online betting sites UK has to offer, which would more than double the tax revenue alone. The estimates re the amount of money Americans were spending on illegal gambling was $150bn a year, no wonder states were after a slice of that pie.

Online gambling has seen massive growth in recent years but there were still problems with legalization of such activities. As recent as 2006 the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed. The legislation made financial transactions via online gambling service providers illegal.

This wasn’t the most popular piece of legislation ever passed. Americans had been forced to use offshore websites to place their bets. While some these operators stopped allowing American customers using their services, others continued to provide them.

You might have thought that the top sports in the USA might be keen to see changes in the law. However, that wasn’t entirely the case, though there was a growing number of officials pressing for change.

The state of New Jersey had been trying to change the laws and claimed that Congress had exceeded their authority when passing that 1992 Act. In 2012, they passed a law allowing sports betting. The major sporting leagues were having none of this, took them to court and won. Two years later, New Jersey repealed laws that made sports betting at casinos and racetracks illegal. Again, they were taken to the supreme court and again they lost. 

They weren’t to give up though and finally last year the Supreme Court ruled in their favour. The court ruled that individual states could make the decisions themselves. Representatives of the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL had argued in court that legalizing sports betting would hurt the integrity of their games. Since the repeal, a whole range of dedicated apps for New Jersey Sportsbooks have been released in to the market.

With this hurdle finally out of the way states soon began to make sports betting legal. Casinos now run books on sporting events and the now legal gambling is providing states with much needed new avenues of revenue.