Online Gambling Battle Heating Up

April 29, 2009

It would seem that the National Football League is not pleased with the announcement that the Professional Poker Association would be putting more money toward the fight to make online gambling legal. The PPA announced that they would be putting another $3 million to the cause to see the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, or UIGEA, overturned, and to see online gambling legalized.

However, the NFL had just made their own announcement stating that they were hiring a full time lobbyist to work on keeping the online gambling industry illegal. Their position is that online gambling leads to corruption within the sport, and they are backed by other sports as well. They say that you cannot keep a sport untainted by greed and exploitation if you are allowing people to bet on it.

However, they seem to be ignoring recent reports that say that the two items are mutually exclusive. They say that the one does not influence the other and that reports to the contrary are incorrect. They report that online gambling does not have a negative repercussion on the sports involved, especially football.

So why still push for it? Good question! Sports betting and football have gone together like milk and cookies for more years than we can count, and it certainly predates the idea of online gambling and the internet. However, that does not seem to matter, both the NFL and the NCAA have vowed to keep online gambling illegal. With more than half of the world�s sports betting coming from the United States, there is no wonder that there might be some confusion as to how popular it is � after all reports don�t seem to mean much.

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