It may be difficult to remember now — here at the end of 2025, with major sports so entwined with gambling as to make you wonder whether our games still exist to crown champions or merely as fodder for young, twitchy-fingered sportsbook customers — but not so long ago, sports leagues spoke of the gambling industry as if it were the devil itself.
“It’s evil,” Bud Selig, then MLB’s commissioner, said in November 2012 of the dangers of gambling. “It creates doubt, and it destroys your sport.”
“Gambling,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that same week when asked about threats to pro football’s integrity, “would be number one on my list.”
