"What I worry about is fans betting against their favorite team or booing their former favorite player because they lost a bet," said professor Daniel McIntosh.
"I worry about the potential downsides of gambling addiction and a lack of proper safety measures in place. I worry about the future of sports. And again, I hope I’m just becoming a nervous nelly in my old age."
“This will continue to be a contest of two different visions of what sport is and who is allowed to participate in and control sport,” said Andrés Martinez, a research scholar at Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute. “I think this is a bit of a reset, though, in that it does set an important precedent and a standard that sporting federations cannot continue to act with impunity and just let the highest bidder dictate what happens in sport, oblivious to other considerations, including the behavior of those highest bidders.”
"It seems like people haven't changed their opinion about it, and so this seems to be one of those topics that if you've had an opinion that you were not in favor of sports betting that hasn't changed," said Global Sport Institute director of research Scott Brooks. "It doesn't matter about the news and whether or not states are legalizing it."
