The 'level playing field' gets more lopsided
Cleveland Guardians pitchers Luis Ortiz, left, outside federal court in Brooklyn, and Emmanuel Clase were both indicted on charges that they had rigged pitches. Credit: AP / Yuki Iwamura, Jeff Chiu
Recent news from Turkey has a familiar stench.
A betting scandal that saw 149 soccer match officials suspended for wagering on their sport exploded this past week when an astonishing 1,024 players — some competing in Turkey’s top professional divisions — were suspended for betting on soccer as part of that investigation.
“To get Turkish football back to where it belongs,” Turkish Football Federation president Ibrahim Haciosmanoglu said, “we need to clean up whatever filth there is.”
An understandable reaction, but easier said than done. Match officials in Turkey were being increasingly accused of bias in their refereeing before the scandal broke and Istanbul’s chief public prosecutor has been probing allegations of match-fixing for months. Haciosmanoglu says Turkish soccer has a “moral” problem and that is true, but there is a larger issue here — one that threatens to batter America sports as well.
Last week, Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted by the federal government on charges that they had rigged pitches in a big prop-bet conspiracy. The duo allegedly accepted bribes to throw certain pitches that allowed gamblers to cash in on bets on the speed and outcome of those pitches.
That followed FBI accusations and arrests of several NBA players for sharing inside information and, on at least three occasions, removing themselves from games citing fake injuries to help gamblers win bets. The players allegedly were paid flat fees or shares of the gamblers’ betting profits. One law enforcement official likened it to “insider trading.”
In each case, the ripples are immense. The most severe damage is the blow to each sport’s integrity.
Anywhere you go, sports are popular. Often, insanely so. They serve as entertainment and escapism, function as community identity and glue, and attract followers from across demographic spectrums. But their viability depends on their integrity; undergirding such intense interest is the assumption that the competition is fair with games won and lost on merit. The phrase “a level playing field,” after all, derives from sports — level literally connoting fairness. These betting scandals put that proposition in doubt and invite fans to question every result — from an individual play to the final score.
Sport is not the only institution being buffeted by gales of distrust, nor the only one that must maintain its integrity to survive.
Athletes, coaches or game officials conspiring to fix things to ensure a particular outcome is analogous to what’s happening to our electoral system, where borders of legislative districts are being zealously redrawn to eliminate meaningful competition and predetermine winners. Polls show that voters of all stripes deplore these power grabs. The risk is that jaded voters express their disaffection by staying home. The parallel danger for sports is obvious.
In America, we also have an economy whose rules and regulations are written to favor those already flush while making it harder for others move up, and a college admissions process which often favors, subtly or not, certain groups over others — a new report from The Century Foundation found that 56% of students in the top income quartile receive grants that exceed their financial need as compared with 0.2% of students in the bottom quartile.
It’s no wonder some Americans are starting to sour on capitalism in favor of alternative economic systems.
There have been betting scandals before in American sports, but this moment feels different. Professional sports have been rushing headlong to embrace the explosion in sports betting. In 2018, Americans wagered less than $5 billion legally on sports; last year, it was $150 billion, more than half wagered on games in progress. Bettors have hundreds of options, as the Clase-Ortiz indictment showed. Leagues and teams have partnerships with sportsbooks. At least 13 stadiums have sportsbooks on their premises.
Care to wager on the fate of integrity?
The question about what could go wrong has already been answered.
Columnist Michael Dobie’s opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
