Sports Betting History

The history of sports betting has always been very scandalized. Unsavory characters and desultory legal treatment has always been two of the most prominent features of sports betting. Sports betting has also been given a lot of media hype and huge public exposure. It is not that sports betting attracts a lot of attention only due to the sports factor. Another main reason why sports betting has caused a lot of scandals in real life is due to the connection it has with organized crime. A lot of organized criminal activities take place from the money acquired from sports betting. Funding and money laundering are two chief reasons for the association of the Mafia with sports betting.

In 1919, probably the first large scale sports betting scandal took place when several members of the Chicago White Sox were bribed so that they could overthrow the World Series. This scandal popularly came to be known as the Black Sox Scandal and is till date regarded as the first large scale evidence of illegal sports betting and match fixing.

This scandal has been forever imprinted in history with the book and movie Eight Men Out. Again in 1978, another sports betting scandal occurred. This was done by some mobsters from the Lucchese crime family. Present in these members were Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill. A point sharing scheme was organized by them with some of the major members of the Boston College.

Examples of sports betting scandals are largely present in the pages of history. On 24 August 1989, Pete Rose who was a baseball team manager accepted permanent voluntary ban from the organization called Major League Baseball. He did this because he was accused of indulging in sports betting in the teams while he was their acting manager. In his 2004 autobiography, Rose acknowledged the reality of his accusal in the book My Prison without Bars.

Perhaps the most famous incident of the century occurred when Colombian defender Andrés Escobar Saldarriaga was brutally murdered after he failed to make his team win the match in the 1994 Fifa World Cup. He had accidentally scored an own-goal and this had resulted in the team losing the match 1-2 with USA. He had allegedly been murdered by the Medellín drug cartel that had lost huge sums on the bet.81

Due to these scandals, in recent years, the sports administrations of USA and of other countries have become very wary and strict. They take proper care to ensure full transparency in case of player injury or replacement.

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