United States vs Europe

For those of you who thought that this post was going to be about the upcoming Ryder Cup, I'm sorry to disappoint.

In the United States a team's uniform is about the only place that is devoid of advertising in North American sports. Even though the stadiums in which the games are played, and the broadcasts we watch and listen to are sponsored by just about every corporate entity you can think of, the team's uniform is left untouched. A few years ago the NFL started allowing corporate sponsors to advertise on practice jerseys and this was the subject of debate on talk shows and newspapers. The New York Giants, for instance, wore advertising sponsoring a watch company, but their star quarterback, Eli Manning, was a paid spokesman for a rival watch company. So while the debate over whether advertising belonged on the uniforms raged over here, the Europeans must have been having a good laugh at the silly Americans. In European all teams wear a corporate sponsor on their game jersey, and this does not seem to cause much of an uproar. I don't know, however, the effect that this has on the old saying "the name on the front of the jersey is a lot more important than the one on the back."

Now, to take things further, some of the European football clubs are sponsored by various casinos. In addition, you can find the betting lines and solicitations for bets on the scrolling ads along the sidelines during soccer games. It is hard to imagine that anything like that would ever happen in the US in one of the major sports. Ever since the Black Sox scandal in 1919 when the Chicago White Sox were paid to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, baseball and the other major sports (football, hockey, and basketball) have struggled to maintain their distance from the influences of gambling. The 8 White Sox who threw the 1919 World Series were banned permanently from the game, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras were suspended for a year by the NFL for betting on football, and Pete Rose has been banned from baseball since 1989 for gambling on baseball. In the US the reason that this arm's length relationship exists is to preserve the legitimacy of the games we watch. The belief is that fans would no longer watch if they thought that the results were fixed, which would basically equate professional sports with professional wrestling.

It would be wrong though to say that the 4 major sports in the US do not recognize that gambling has an impact on their popularity. Fantasy sports leagues, for instance, are a form of betting. And while I am not a fan of fantasy sports (sorry, except for the draft, I think the whole idea is boring), I join many others by entering into a football pool each week, a practice followed by millions. Each week in the NFL the teams are required to release an injury report to the media. The NFL does this because it knows that gamblers and bookmakers require this information in order to set point spreads and make bets. After all, no coach in his right mind would actually want to make such information available to his opponent.

So, while the relationship between the gambling community and the professional sports leagues will never have, at least for the time being, the explicit relationship in the US that they do in Europe, there is an implicit one. The New Jersey Nets may never wear the logo of the Borgata on their jersey, but as long as the point spread in their game with the Miami Heat is published in the paper, that relationship between the league and the gambler will always exist.