Sports leagues urge Congress to ban betting on fighting and football

NFL and UFC match-fixing cases push G2E integrity panel to call for national betting bans

Scandals in the UFC and NBA brought an unusually large crowd to the sports betting integrity session at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, with regulators, operators and at least one ESPN reporter filling the room beyond capacity.

Louis Rogacki, assistant attorney general from New Jersey, opened by stating what every panelist repeated in some form: bettors need confidence that the contests they wager on are real. That confidence, the panel agreed, cannot be maintained by any single actor in the current structure.

Sarah Brennan, vice president of compliance at BetMGM, said no stakeholder has full visibility across the system. BetMGM's role, she said, is to channel suspicious information to law enforcement rather than conduct investigations itself. Chris Dougan, chief government affairs officer at Genius Sports, described the firm's annual education sessions with every PGA Tour player as the baseline of what monitoring integrity requires.

Keith Perschetz, the NFL's director of global sports betting, said approximately 2,000 players receive annual gambling education, with rookies attending twice, their sessions led by veteran players. He also flagged a measurable increase in harassment of players, coaches and officials by bettors, and argued that offenders should face permanent, coordinated bans across all venues — placed in the same regulatory category as casino cheats.