The manner in which sports betting is approached in many places, it is actually pushing the activity to an unregulated marketplace, which may end up becoming a problem for the sports themselves, a study claims.

Let’s take you through a couple of quick facts to begin. As per an analysis carried out by the AGA (American Gaming Association), as many as 81% of all NFL teams, 26 to be precise, play their home games at a stadium situated within an hour’s distance from a brick-and-mortar casino; and almost half of all the NFL teams are put up within an 11 miles’ distance from the nearest casino!

So, even if you place your NFL bets only and only on the internet, at some online casino like online-casinos-canada.ca, you’ve got nothing to worry about the distance of such sports venues from the gambling establishments. Also because they’ve always been there! In fact, this analysis was carried out mainly to bust the myth that it’s impossible for the casinos and professional athletes to exist together in the same city.

Delving a little more into the facts highlighted by this study, 6 NFL teams – Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, New Orleans Saints, Los Angeles Rams and Detroit Lions - always play their home games at a stadium that is 1 mile away from the nearest casino. Expand the radius to 5 miles and you can add 4 more teams to the list – New England Patriots, Cincinnati Bengals, San Diego Chargers and Green Bay Packers. These facts can also be verified from this article published on nydailynews.com.

Key findings

The key findings of this analysis are as follows:

• 6 teams were found to be situated within a 1-mile distance from the nearest casino
• Expanding that radius to 5 miles brought a total of 10 teams in close proximity of a casino
• Half of all the teams that play in NFL are situated at less than 11 miles’ distance from the nearest casino
• 69% of all NFL teams (22 teams) are situated within 30 miles’ distance from a casino. 79% of them (25 teams) are within 30 miles’ distance and 81% (26 teams) are within 35 miles’ distance from the nearest casino.

Conclusion

Contrary to the popular perception, casino gaming and sports betting is a mainstream industry that is welcomed very well by the people of 40 states, including various markets that have their own franchises of NFL and other professional sports leagues. These facts prove it is high time that people start taking a fresh look at the industry of off-line and online sports betting (as also shown in this article on thelondoneconomic.com). The manner in which sports betting is approached in many places, it is actually pushing the activity to an unregulated marketplace, which may end up becoming a problem for the sports themselves.

This study also highlights the fact that if playing a professional sport in a stadium close to a casino would have been an issue for a league like NFL, then NFL always had this problem! And we know from the success of the league that it was never marred by any such issues!