How Sports Betting Took the U.S. by Storm

A landmark Supreme Court decision in May 2018 paved the way for states to choose whether or not to legalize sports betting. Since that time, 28 states have launched live and active sports betting programs with more to follow in the near future.

Betting terms have made their way into the lexicon of everyday sports fans across the country and betting lines can be seen scrolling across the bottom of your TV screen, further cementing this movement as part of the fabric of the modern sports scene. Week 1 of the 2021 NFL season saw a 126% increase in bets year over year for sportsbooks.

MarketScale spoke with Chris Bevilacqua, CEO of SimpleBet, to discuss the rise in popularity for sports betting.

What Chris Bevilacqua Said:

First of all, like you know, we’re three years into the repeal of pass far right and then you had COVID basically shut everything down in 2020. And you know, when things did come back right, there were no fans allowed in stadiums. And so it was a kind of an odd time.

Over the last call it, 18 months. But I think what has since happened, largely due to COVID, I believe, is that you’ve seen a real acceleration on the regulatory front. More states legalizing sports betting a lot faster than most thought and then everything sort of coming back to, I would say not all the way normal, but pretty close to normal, with fans now getting back in stadiums and seasonality and sport calendars getting back on track.

So you have all those things coming together at one time, and I think you’ve got just a general forward thrust here, right? With the things getting back to normal and this new sports betting interactivity, all the technology enabling features around product innovation and so forth have all kind of come together and what we’re seeing now and we now have been live on DraftKings for seven weeks, I believe, right?

We went live at the end of August, started with Major League baseball, rolled right into college football in the NFL. And what we’re seeing is week over week increases. We’re getting live in more states, rolling out to more markets. And I just think now, you know, the just there’s a lot of momentum behind the whole notion of sports betting.