The United States Supreme Court left the decision of whether to legalize sports betting to the individual states in a now-monumental decision in May 2018.
As such, we’ve gotten a wave of complex legislation that varies wildly between states, as well as plenty of political posturing from state governments, sportsbooks and sports leagues.
As Massachusetts lawmakers consider adding sports betting to their state, player’s unions have uncovered another interesting wrinkle.
According to the Boston Globe, those unions are worried that the leagues eventually will give bettors access to biometric data. (College and NFL teams are using such data with much greater frequency, monitoring heart rates, effort level, recovery, sprint speeds and other things.)
Professional sports leagues have tried to mandate that sportsbooks use only their official data — for a fee, of course. For their part, though, the sports leagues deny they have any plans to make biometric data available for sports betting at any time in the future.
Still, there are some athletes and lawyers who have expressed concern.
“That’s a person’s personal health information,” David Foster, a lawyer with the NBA players association, told the Boston Globe. “That has no business in sports. It certainly has no business being bet on.”
I’m not sure sports bettors would even want that information to be available.
Would you really want to get put into a position where you have to analyze a kicker’s heart rate just before a game-winning field goal attempt in the NFL playoffs, and then try to make decisions on live bets based on that data?
It would just add another layer of complexity that may be exploitable to someone, somewhere, but also could just make sportsbooks that much sharper when they set their lines.
It does not seem like this issue will be a major sticking point for future legislation. But players and their lawyers are making sure that they aren’t left out of legal discussions and maintain leverage for negotiations on future labor agreements.
But looking to the future, it isn’t inconceivable that this sort of data will be made public at some point.