Legal Betting on WWE Matches Tests Boundaries of ‘Sports’ Betting
With WWE pushing states to legalize gambling on its matches, regulators need to be comfortable with people betting real money on choreographed events in which the winners and losers are predetermined and known to others.
Some regulators aren’t.
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“I have a fear of accepting wagers on any event that is perceived to have an outcome that is not based upon performance, but is based upon scripted or engineered efforts,” New Hampshire Lottery Commission executive director Charlie McIntyre told Sportico. McIntyre, a former prosecutor, added, “It is very unlikely that New Hampshire would consider the WWE suitable content for sports betting.”
McIntyre’s comments reflect the unique space pro wrestling has occupied in American sports and why betting on matches is inherently problematic.
For most of the 20th century, many fans remained unaware that pro wrestling was unlike baseball, football and other sports where teams and athletes genuinely compete. This was the result of “kayfabe,” described in court documents as a “code of silence” shared by wrestlers and promoters to “insulate wrestling from scrutiny from the outside world.” As University of Tennessee law professor Alex Long wrote in a recent law review article, “if too many people in the audience stopped believing that what they saw was ‘real’ (or if the ‘fakeness’ became too obvious to overlook), the thinking was, they might stop buying tickets.”
But in 1989, the jig was up—sort of.
Up to that time, pro wrestling was governed by state athletic associations, which imposed fees and taxes and required registrations for competitors. In an attempt to avoid such payments, WWE (then called WWF) went before New Jersey state senators asking to be excluded from those obligations. The senators only relented after the company acknowledged its version of wrestling was “’an activity in which participants struggle hand-in-hand primarily for the purpose of providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona fide athletic contest.”
At the time, The New York Times wrote, wrestling promoters had admitted “their terrifying towers in spandex tights” were “really no more dangerous to one another than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”
Yet the line pro wrestling straddles between sport and entertainment remains a source of dispute, which complicates whether betting ought to be permitted. Courts in Connecticut, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee have issued conflicting decisions on whether pro wrestling is a sport, entertainment activity or hybrid.
For example, in Underwriters at Lloyds London v. Yale, a Connecticut judge in 2007 denied a motion for summary judgment because of a “genuine issue of material fact as to whether professional wrestling constitutes an entertainment event, as opposed to an athletic or sporting event.” The case involved an insurance company denying coverage for an injured pro wrestler because the policy contained an exclusion for injuries occurring during “any sports or athletic contest.” The court found the case presented “ambiguity” and required more deliberation because the wrestler was, like an actor, obligated “to follow the scripted matches.”
In WWE’s favor, some states have sanctioned betting on events that have already happened or that at least a few people already know the results of. A handful of states allow historical race wagering, also known as instant racing. Using a machine, bettors wager on a race that occurred years ago. The bettor is denied the name of the horses, the date and location of the race and other information that could facilitate a rigged wager. But other relevant data, such as pedigree and pace, are shared.
Legalized betting has also expanded to entertainment competitions. A year after the Supreme Court ruled in Murphy v. NCAA (2018) that the federal ban on states legalizing sports betting was unconstitutional, the state that led the fight—New Jersey—became the first to legalize betting on the Academy Awards. When the winner of an Oscar is announced, the result is already known, albeit only to a couple of PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting partners who are legally bound by strict professional duties of confidentiality.
WWE might similarly keep the outcome of fights confidential, but as of now, the number of people “in the know” appears higher. That was apparent in a complaint filed last week in a New York federal court by former WWE writer Britney Abrams. She accuses WWE of race and gender discrimination. In making her case, Abrams described multiple people involved in the writing and shaping of WWE fights. That’s not surprising since those fights are fundamentally TV shows, but her complaint is a reminder of the kinds of issues WWE, which is set to join UFC in a multibillion dollar merger controlled by Endeavor, must overcome in convincing states to allow betting.
The financial upside of legalized betting on its matches could be huge for WWE, so it’s pressing hard, but it finds itself in on unfamiliar ground: a tussle in which it can’t control the outcome.
