Sports betting has been around for centuries but it has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Individual bettors have won hundreds of millions of dollars, but now the growth of the industry has also resulted in several high-profile arrests and suspensions among athletes.
Baseball players, NBA coaches and NCAA athletes have all been arrested and charged for illegal gambling. Betting on plays, rigging plays leading to suspensions and arrests. Sports gambling needs a reset. There have been too many times athletes have gotten in trouble, due to illegal activities.
Sports betting is almost as old as sports themselves. These bets concluded Olympic events, gladiator fights, chariot races and even animal contests. People often wagered large sums of money, property and other assets, and some historians connect early gambling revenue to major construction projects such as sections of the Great Wall during the Han Dynasty.
Sports gambling continued through the Middle Ages with horse racing, and became even more structured in the 19th century as modern sports like baseball, boxing and football emerged. Early bookmakers began keeping records and developing standardized odds, marking a major breakthrough in the history of betting.
That breakthrough carried into the 20th century, when sports betting exploded in baseball and boxing in the United States. The 1919 Black Sox scandal remains one of the darkest chapters in sports history: eight players were accused of accepting money to intentionally lose the World Series and were banned for life.
George F. Prindeville, a prosecutor in the case, was furious, saying the players had “turned baseball into a con game.”
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the internet transformed betting. The first online sportsbooks appeared, making wagering accessible from virtually anywhere.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting. Since then, 35 states have legalized sports wagering, creating a multibillion-dollar industry. Today, there are more than 50 legal sports-betting websites in the United States, not including the many illegal offshore sites that still operate.
Statista, a company that specializes in data gathering, found that there were 17,604 businesses in the sports betting and lotteries market worldwide as of early 2025. The number of online sportsbooks continues to shift as new companies launch and others shut down.
Billy Walters, known as one of the most successful sports bettors in Las Vegas history, reportedly went 30 straight years without a losing season, winning tens of millions of dollars. But in 2017, Walters was convicted of insider trading, ending his legendary run.
Walters was famously confident, once saying, “It’s not gambling if you know you’re going to win.”
By 2025, sports betting has reached new levels. Multiple sportsbooks have reported record-breaking numbers driven by the NFL and college football seasons. New York, New Jersey and Nevada all posted billion-dollar months.
This increased revenue has also sparked controversy and suspensions. In the last two years, three NFL players — Isaiah Rodgers, Nicholas Petit-Frere and Cam Robinson — were suspended. Two Premier League players, one NHL player and several college athletes have also faced bans. But nothing compares to what recently happened in the NBA.
The NBA season had barely begun when Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and 10-year veteran on the Miami Heat,Terry Rozier were arrested in connection with a sports-betting investigation, both are on leave from their respective teams. They were among 36 individuals taken into custody as part of a year-long federal probe.
According to the indictments, the defendants “had access to private information known by NBA players or NBA coaches that would likely affect the outcome of games or players’ performances, and provided that information to other co-conspirators in exchange for either a flat fee or a share of betting profits.”
Federal investigations are still ongoing.
In MLB, two players on the Cleveland Guardians were recently arrested on sports-gambling charges. In modern betting markets, gamblers can wager on extremely small details of a game —down to a specific pitch. In this case, pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted on federal charges alleging that they intentionally manipulated pitches in exchange for bribes linked to prop bets.
Officials in the MLB were alerted after sportsbooks detected unusual betting patterns on specific pitch outcomes. A large number of these bets were placed from the Dominican Republic — where both Clase and Ortiz grew up—raising red flags.
Professional leagues have been placed in an awkward position, facing criticism for allowing such activity to develop under their watch. MLB released a statement saying, “MLB contacted federal law enforcement at the outset of its investigation and has fully cooperated throughout the process. We are aware of the indictment and the arrests, and our investigation is ongoing.”
Sports gambling has become a full time job for people, but has also been career ending for professional athletes. Sports gambling will not stop, but a heavier security check will need to be put in place to put an end to professional athletes doing it.
