Five professional sports leagues and their players associations jointly asked state gambling regulators to write rules that permanently bar bettors who threaten or harass the people officiating and playing the games. The Associated Press obtained the letter, sent Tuesday to regulators in 35 states and the District of Columbia. The signatories are the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, Major League Soccer and the NHL, along with their respective players associations — ten bodies in all, an unusual alignment given how often leagues and unions disagree.
The ask is narrow and administrative, and it is aimed at the states rather than at the operators the leagues do business with.
What the letter requests
The signatories want rules established to permanently revoke betting privileges for anyone found to have threatened or “abusively harassed” a professional or amateur athlete, coach, official or team personnel. Amateur athletes are in the language, which puts college and Olympic competitors inside the same protection as professionals.
They frame the problem as a consequence of legalization rather than an abuse of it:
“While the expansion of legal, state-regulated sports betting has brought new ways for fans to engage with their favorite sports, it has also introduced some negative consequences for players and other personnel involved with professional sporting events. Too often, individuals who lose sports bets direct threatening and harassing messages toward players coaches and their families via social media and in-person interactions.”
And they locate the line where the criminal law already does:
“Threatening the safety of an athlete or their family members over a sports bet crosses a bright ethical and criminal line and it is entirely unacceptable. It is critical that state and local leaders safeguard the participants of sports at all levels.”
Legal Sports Report, an industry trade publication that reported the same letter, lists three mechanisms behind the request: mandatory lifetime revocation of wagering privileges on verified evidence, a standardized cross-operator reporting framework so leagues, teams, players and unions can transmit evidence to regulators and law enforcement for placement on statewide exclusion lists — with exclusion in one state reciprocated in others — and operator accountability, meaning sportsbooks would be required to monitor, flag and ban abusive accounts as a condition of holding a state license.
The gap the letter names
Four states already exclude “bad actors” from licensed sportsbooks and mobile applications: Ohio, West Virginia, Louisiana and Wyoming. The letter asks for rules in the other 35 states and the District of Columbia, none of which has equivalent protections in place since the Supreme Court cleared the way for state-by-state legalization in 2018.
The patchwork is exactly what the request is meant to fix, and it is also why the request is addressed to regulators rather than to the companies. A ban enforced by one operator, or by one state, leaves the banned customer free to open an account somewhere else and keep betting on the same athletes.
There is already partial voluntary coverage. Massachusetts has run a reporting system, “Bet on Respect,” with the support of BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings, Fanatics and FanDuel. BetMGM amended its terms of service in February to cover harassment of officials, coaches and athletes. Fanatics, with IC360 and Signify Group, launched a monitoring program that shares evidence across operators. West Virginia passed a ban in 2024; Ohio adopted one in 2023 and then banned college player propositions a year later; Louisiana’s exclusion law took effect last month.
What the request moves, and what it leaves alone
Two things are worth separating here. The first is that the mechanism the leagues want built is state infrastructure: exclusion lists, reciprocity between states, a reporting pipeline that has to verify evidence before it is used to strip someone’s account, and license conditions that make operators police their own customers. That work lands on state commissions, which have to adjudicate claims of harassment that arrive from leagues and unions with a commercial interest in the outcome.
The second is that a banned customer is a lost customer, which is why the letter asks for license conditions rather than better terms of service. Voluntary programs are uneven by design, and the leagues’ own filings make the case: BetMGM and Fanatics have acted, which means the rest can be asked why they have not.
Not in the letter: the leagues’ own betting revenue. Sponsorships, official-data arrangements and the pursuit of prediction-market partners — CNBC reported in September that the NFL wants better regulation of potential prediction-market partners rather than no partners — sit outside a document addressed solely to the conduct of customers. The letter asks states to protect the people the product is priced on. It does not ask the leagues to reconsider the product.