Related to a certain thread I started earlier with the exception that this time, the act isn’t theoretically illegal everywhere in the country, let’s say a team in a nationally-broadcast sport is caught indisputably cheating. Say further that this team is based in a state where betting on sports is illegal.
Now, in a state where gambling on sports is legal, some gamblers who got financially hurt by the cheating sue the team for dishonestly making them lose money. After all, they materially benefited the team by pumping up viewership numbers and making the games more attractive to advertisers. Some of them even bought merchandise. And, of course, they lost money in the casino, but not to the sports team.
So. As far as I can tell, nobody broke any actual laws, assuming cheating in sports isn’t illegal. Playing sports is legal where the team is, betting on sports is legal where the gamblers are, and the Feds aren’t even trying to claim that gambling should be illegal everywhere. (Sidebar: Can anyone else think of a scenario like this one which doesn’t involve gambling?)
What happens when the suit goes into the system? Is there even a trial?
Rigged TV quiz shows used to be legal in the US.
But when the rigging of certain shows came to light, the country responded with outrage and forced Congress to pass a law against it. I wondered if that would have any bearing on rigged football games broadcast on TV, but unfortunately the law only applies to “a purportedly bona fide contest of intellectual knowledge or intellectual skill.”
Maybe the latest controversy will spark similar legislation? Yeah, not likely.
Anyway, there were some grand jury hearings and criminal charges for being less than truthful with investigators, but I couldn’t find anything that said there were any lawsuits.
Unless Congress or a State passes laws prohibiting it no one is going to go to jail over ‘inflate-gate’-style professional sports cheating. But, they (the players, coaches, owners etc.) are breaking the terms of the civil contract they have with the NFL organization. Therefore they can legally be held accountable for any fines, suspensions, expulsions etc. that the NFL’s lawyers choose to charge them with. In other words, it’s all about the money.
I think that’s irrelevant (and stipulated in the OP). What recourse does the gambler have?
I’d say they cannot recover anything from the team. For liability to exist, the team has to have harmed gamblers, and the gamblers chose to gamble. If both gambling and cheating are legal, gambling has to include the risk of cheating. There has to be some presumption that the team owed the gamblers an honest game, and I can’t see how they do.
On the other hand, it might be that the league was negligent in not preventing cheating, and gamblers might have a shot at them.
Bribery has connotations of paying off a public official in the course of performing their duties.. Even if referrees or umpires could be thought of as public officials (very doubtful) there are plenty of ways to cheat which don’t involve paying them off.
Bribery to influence the outcome of a sporting event is most certainly illegal in the United States. The relevant federal law is the Sports Bribery Act of 1964. There are similar laws on the books in most if not all states.
The usual form that such bribery takes is bribery of players to play poorly and lose. There have been numerous prosecutions of players for such at the collegiate level. Another obvious form of potential bribery is bribery of match officials.
There are no laws, at the federal level at least, specifically against other types of dishonesty, such as a league rigging its own events (to favor, for example, teams in better TV markets), or players cheating to win. Players are expected to push the envelope and look for every possible edge, and it’s the league’s responsibility to police itself, since the league has most to lose if the public loses confidence in its integrity.
This cuts to the heart of it, and it might be the best possible answer, absent case law or similar.
The bit about suing the league is interesting, as well. Kind of a hail-mary, perhaps, but when the chips are down, and the breaks are against you, you got to tell the boys to go out there, and litigate one for the punter!
In short, Davydenko was a huge favorite at a small tournament in Poland. Huge bets were coming in for him to lose. After he won the first set, the bets against him increased. He abandoned the match in the third set, claiming an injury. It looked like a classic case of throwing a match, but nobody has ever been able to prove anything.
I imagine if a similar case of cheating were to come up, the betting companies would simply void all of the bets. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are such contingencies in the fine print when making bets.
It should be noted that similar issues were litigated in the earlier Belichick film-spying scandal, although never by gamblers. The litigation was entirely unsuccessful: