Sports Betting Scandals: Lessons from History

Take the large-scale gambling scandal of 1964, for example, which saw 10 professional footballers in England goaled for an array of match-fixing and wagering offences.

Of course, sports betting scandals aren’t exclusive to either association football or the UK, with history having seen a number of such incidents across the global sporting realm. I’ll touch more on some of the most infamous scandals below, each of which occurred before the advent of online sports betting sites.

I’ll start with the infamous ‘Black Sox Scandal’, which describes a Major League Baseball game-fixing scandal that occurred in 1919.

This saw eight members of the Chicago White Sox accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, in exchange for cash from a major sports betting syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein.

Despite the players involved being acquitted publicly in 1921, the fallout was immense, as Judge Landis permanently banned all eight men from professional baseball after the National Baseball Commission was dissolved. The players were subsequently prohibited from being admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame too, with this ban having been upheld since despite numerous protests.

Some 31 years later, a similar event occurred in the form of the CCNY point-shaving scandal. This was a college basketball gambling scandal that occurred during the 1950/51 season, with this involving a total of seven American schools (four of which were located in the New York metropolitan area).

Point shaving is a specific type of match-fixing, through which the perpetrators seek to change the final score and leverage higher value markets at sportsbooks without changing who wins.

This scandal was broad and incredibly large in scale, while it began with