Findings from a new national survey suggest that professional sports in the United States are suffering from a significant credibility crisis, with 50% of Americans now believing that athletes “often” or “sometimes” manipulate how they play to help sports gamblers win bets.
The results come from a new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted by Morning Consult, which also showed that 41% of respondents believe the increased availability of online gambling has been bad for sports.
The survey comes at a time when sports leagues across the country continue to reel from the fallout of betting scandals, with MLB, the NBA, and most recently the NCAA all facing integrity concerns linked to alleged pitch-rigging, insider-betting schemes, and point-shaving investigations.
However, the recent scandals don’t appear to have dampened Americans’ appetite for gambling, as the survey found that 28% of those surveyed said they have placed a wager through a sportsbook, online platform, or mobile app.
The results are an example of just how embedded betting has become in mainstream American sports culture, even as skepticism about the fairness of sporting events has gone up.
Survey Finds Broad Distrust of Athlete Conduct
According to the survey, half of Americans believe pro athletes often or sometimes change their play on the court or field to help bettors win. If we break those numbers down even further, we find that 11% think this happens often, while 39% say it happens sometimes. Another 22% say it happens rarely, 9% say it never happens, and 18% say they simply don’t know.
Findings from the poll show that there’s widespread unease about gambling’s place in sports. Overall, 41% of those polled believe that the increased availability of online betting has been bad for sports, compared to 30% who felt it has been neither good nor bad, and 16% who said it has been good.
The survey also showed a significant generational divide in who participates in sports betting. Overall, 28% of Americans said they had bet on sports, but when the survey controlled for age, that number rose to 44% among millennials and 40% among Gen Z. By comparison, only 15% of baby boomers said they had wagered on sports.
Morning Consult surveyed 2,002 registered voters nationwide from February 10 to 13. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Latest Results Add to a Growing Pattern
The results of this survey are consistent with recent polling showing that Americans’ confidence in the integrity of the sports they watch is decreasing. A YouGov survey published in November found that 65% of Americans believed professional athletes sometimes or often alter their play to benefit bettors.
Another survey from the NBC News Decision Desk found that 70% of Americans agreed that sports betting lessens the integrity of the game, while 63% said they were concerned that increased access to betting could result in games being fixed or rigged.
Among sports bettors specifically, a Sacred Heart University and GreatBlue Research poll found that 79.1% said the NBA betting scandal had damaged their trust in the integrity of NBA games.
When viewed as a whole, these studies make it clear that there’s a significant “credibility gap” that leagues and sportsbooks must address to regain public trust in the fairness of games.
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Findings from a new national survey suggest that professional sports in the United States are suffering from a significant credibility crisis, with 50% of Americans now believing that athletes “often” or “sometimes” manipulate how they play to help sports gamblers win bets. The results come from a new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted
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