Chris Christie on Sports Betting: A Critical Analysis of the Current Landscape

Chirs Christie, chuckling, recalls how quickly signing New Jersey’s first legalized sports gambling law in 2012 sparked a lawsuit from the NCAA and the nation’s largest professional sports leagues against his state. The Republican governor’s goal at the time was to reassert Atlantic City as an East Coast gambling destination and drive tourism to a shoreline in need of an economic boost.

After years of legal fights sparked in part by that New Jersey law and a landmark Supreme Court ruling, today FanDuel, DraftKings and several of the country’s largest sportsbooks have built extensive partnerships with leagues like the NFL, NBA and NHL.

Christie says the change of heart by the leagues after the Supreme Court ruling was gradual but calculated and driven by one key motivation. “Money,” Christie said during an interview with The Hill. “The idea that these people who run these leagues or the NCAA initially said this was the greatest threat to the integrity of their sports and they wouldn’t have it, and now they’re partners with the very people they tried to stop, is richly ironic to me.”

Following an extensive career in partisan politics, including heated clashes with President Trump and a run for the GOP nomination for the White House, Christie now spends a portion of his time in public life traveling the country and advocating for legal sports gambling, a matter of “states’ rights,” he says.

He currently represents the American Gaming Association and served as an advisor to DraftKings from the time he left office in 2018 until 2021. “Each state regulates it based on the size of their state, the demographics and level of interest,” he said. “Ten states don’t have sports betting. If you turn it federal, do every state have to accept and rely on the federal government to regulate sports betting? What could possibly go wrong there?”

Christie’s defense of the American gaming industry comes as polls show more Americans are growing increasingly weary of the prevalence of sports gambling in society and worry about its impact on the integrity of competition.

Fans, coaches and lawmakers have also complained about sports betting’s impact on the modern-day sports viewing experience, which routinely comes with a steady wave of promotions and advertisements urging fans to sign up for gambling service.

A spate of game rigging scandals, including some where coaches and athletes have shared insider injury information or altered their performance to benefit gamblers, has meanwhile gotten the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"Nobody thinks this stuff didn’t happen before legal sports gambling,” Christie argues. “People should have a greater confidence now than they’ve ever had because in 40 states across the country people are watching bets come in, monitoring unusual activity and when there is, investigating it thoroughly.”

One of the largest threats to the legal sports gambling industry is the rise of prediction markets, which are largely unregulated by the government but have exploded in popularity in recent years.

Industry observers are closely watching the Trump administration’s posture toward these prediction markets, which allow users the ability to buy “event contracts” tied to a specific outcome in areas ranging from sports and entertainment to global affairs and war.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Mike Selig has taken criticism in recent weeks for throwing the Trump administration’s support behind prediction markets like Kalshi and Predictit.

Critics of prediction market services say they are riper for corruption because they do not cooperate with state regulators on issues like integrity monitoring like legal sportsbooks do, allowing users to more feasibly impact the outcome of a specific market. Several states where sports betting is legal have sued prediction markets for operating in their jurisdictions, a fight Christie says the Trump administration should stay out of.

Prediction markets are essentially sports betting, he argues, and should be subject to the same government scrutiny. “I can’t understand why commissioner Selig is doing what he’s doing. It seems to me he’s got enough to do to regulate the markets that are within his purview,” Christie said. “I don’t know why he wants to become the national sports betting commissioner. These are cowboys who are trying to avoid paying taxes and being regulated”.

Major sports leagues and gambling platforms have themselves faced lawsuits over their business relationships and the impact critics say their services have on the American consumer. Even amid the growing partnerships, there remain signs of discomfort between major leagues and sportsbooks as the threat of stricter regulation and more lawsuits loom.

The NCAA, as part of an ongoing suit against DraftKings aiming to get the company to stop using its “March Madness” branding on its app, argues an affiliation with sports gambling harms its reputation and “distorts the NCAA’s identity … undermining decades of deliberate efforts to promote policies, programs, and public messaging designed to separate collegiate athletics from commercial gambling”.

Most observers agree intervention from the government or courts system on sports gambling and prediction markets could take years to play out. “There is too much crossover between a sports bet and prediction market contract to allow the law to be structured the way it is now,” said Matthew Bakowicz, a former operations official for DraftKings at Foxwoods Resort Casino. “More than likely, you’re going to see this move to the Supreme Court and lead to a state-by-state regulation because those are already in place for all 50 states regarding sports betting. But it will definitely take some time to get through the court system”.