WWE aiming to legalize betting on matches: Report

WWE is hoping to cash in on the online gambling craze. The company reportedly intakes to legalize betting on high profile scripted matches. Joining us now to dive in a bit deeper, we're joined by Josh Schaver. Everybody's talking about this story, Josh, because it is like you can bet on any, almost anything, right? But you can't bet on almost anything with the organization that determines the outcome of the bet. And you can't bet on scripted things, it's really normally the big determination. I mean, I guess you could bet on who's going to die in this TV series, right? On usually like an offshore book, though. Exactly, exactly.

Right, you're not betting with Paramount on who's going to die in a Paramount. And so the WWE is kind of going through the front door here, like you said. So this is all a CMBC report. I reached out to WWE, they declined to comment. Multiple sports books I talked to earlier in the day said that this was news to them. Obviously, you would think that the sports books and the casinos would have to be looped in at some point if they were going to do this betting. And so what CMBC is reporting is that the WWE has reached out to state gambling regulators in Colorado and Michigan to bet on scripted matches.

Now, as we just showed there with a map, sports gambling is widely legal, basically in the United States at this point. In over 33 states in DC, you can bet on things like the Oscars this weekend in less than 10 states. So state regulators thus far have not been very comfortable with the concept of betting on something that is regulated. Or sorry, that is scripted. And then I should add, I spoke to some sports books this morning and really it was surprising how they have not discussed it at all internally, they said. They had no idea this was coming. And they pointed to basically the scrutiny that they see when they're even trying to get live sports gambling pass for certain sports.

We've talked a lot about live golf on this program over the last 10 months. That's a new golf league that appeared. They said that that they pretty much couldn't get approved because the Facebook feed, it was originally on Facebook live and it was a laggy Facebook live feed. And state regulators were worried about that impacting the outcome from someone that was there calling someone and betting on it. So this is a highly, highly regulated market and sports gambling companies have not succeeded as far as getting things like that approved or not wanted to get into that market. And that's something that I think you have to think about here. There's someone that has to make a market and be comfortable offering those odds.

Would you be comfortable offering odds on something when you know someone else might know the outcome? That's probably not the best business model in these sports books and casinos probably wouldn't want to offer that. I want to ask real quick, like why WDW, I mean, obviously it wants the additional income stream, but WDW has also been undergoing some turmoil, safe to say, in terms of its leadership. So like, what's the backdrop here as we're talking about this story? Yeah, I mean, it seems like everyone wants to get into gambling that has some form of content right now. And we talk about it a lot, right? Gambling just sort of, it keeps people engaged throughout the entire stream of a broadcast, right? That's what a lot of people go for here is if you can gamble on the first match in WWE and then there's multiple matches throughout the night, you can keep people engaged, keep them there longer. If people are watching the stream longer, you can make more money off advertisers. So there's a path to more money there. But again, it's a scripted show and that's not really something we see a lot of.

So I understand it. And when we talk about the WWE sale, right, Julie, if they had gambling, that would certainly be more advantageous because maybe they could make more money. But it seems like something that's a little far off right now. Yeah. It'll be interesting to watch. Josh Schaefer, thanks so much.

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