The Worldwide Leader in Sports is officially joining the booming sports gambling industry.
On Tuesday, ESPN announced that they’ll be launching the ESPN Bet sportsbook through a partnership with PENN Entertainment. The sports app will go live this fall in 16 states, the network’s announcement read.
ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro gave the following statement on the groundbreaking announcement:
“Our primary focus is always to serve sports fans and we know they want both betting content and the ability to place bets with less friction from within our products. The strategy here is simple: to give fans what they’ve been requesting and expecting from ESPN. PENN Entertainment is the perfect partner to build an unmatched user experience for sports betting with ESPN BET.”
ESPN Bet will allow customers to place wagers through the website, mobile website and mobile app. On top of that, the statement read that PENN “will receive odds attribution, promotional services inclusive of digital product integrations, traditional media and content integrations.”
This past May marked five years since the Supreme Court of the United States allowed sports betting nationwide by overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA). Signed into law in Oct. 1992, the PASPA banned sports gambling from taking place throughout most parts of the nation.
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But the Supreme Court ruled that the PASPA violated the nation’s Tenth Amendment. This ruling allowed each state to legalize online/mobile and/or in-person sports betting. Here we are in Aug. 2023, and now more than 37 states have launched a fashion of legalized sports betting.
Back in May, Wayne Perry of the Associated Press reported that Americans have wagered over $220 billion on sports since the SCOTUS overturned the PASPA.
FOX Sports, another major sports network in the U.S., launched its own sportsbook called “FOX Bet” in the fall of 2019. It’ll be interesting to see if other networks like NBC and CBS decide to join the sports betting world by launching their own sportsbooks like FOX and ESPN.
