From Isolation to Coordination
A Proposal for Cross-Sport Security
Speed Read (Get the headlines here, and read on below)
The sports industry is facing growing integrity and safety risks—both online and in the physical world.
Like in the national security world before 9/11 there are silos preventing broader information sharing. The sports ecosystem needs this information to improve threat detection and mitigation.
A solution to help solve part of this problem is an information sharing hub involving sports leagues, teams, sportsbooks, and other stakeholders.
This hub would help address not just betting irregularities, but also online harms and physical threats, while offering leagues a degree of strategic oversight and reputational risk mitigation.
The effort would demonstrate that leagues value integrity and community safety, not just revenue, and would create a scalable, collaborative model that strengthens sports' long-term resilience.
The Full Story
As a policy expert who used to work on national security issues in both the Executive Branch and Legislative Branch you learn that often there are two parts to the job. One part is being able to find, understand, and then help other people understand a threat. The other part is working collaboratively to think of ideas to help counter the threat. I write a lot about risks that I see bubbling up around the sports industry as a whole and I try to point them out so people can be aware of them and counter them. Today I want to go a step further and make a proposal that I think mitigates several risks. One problem I see is that the sports industry is too siloed, preventing better threat mitigation. It’s time to break those silos to stop the misuse of gambling markets, along with slowing the rise of online harassment and abuse. I am proposing an information-sharing hub designed to enhance security, integrity, and resilience across the sports ecosystem.
I’ve written before about how teams, leagues, athletes, their partners in the sports gambling industry and other stakeholders are in a sort of pre-9/11 posture. What I mean by that is before 9/11 the various parts of the U.S. government charged with keeping us safe here at home were siloed. They did not want to share information with each other, they often unknowingly worked at cross-purposes, and they failed to pursue any sort of interoperability, among other issues. It is all detailed in the 9/11 Commission Report. In the ensuing 24 years Congress and the security establishment in the U.S. tried to fix some of those issues in part by forcing information sharing. To put it more plainly, if everyone played nicely in the sandbox together, we would all be better off.
I think the broader sports industry faces a similar predicament now. Teams and leagues, for business purposes, keep their information to themselves. They don’t want another owner to take advantage of their special sauce, whether that be an owner in the same sport or an owner of another team in the same city. Layer on top of that, sports books, social media companies and others who also do not want to share information. But the threat picture we face in the United States is now more complex than it is has ever been. This is certainly true for threats to the integrity of sports. This unprecedented threat matrix is fueled by a combination of leagues’ embrace of sports gambling, gambling’s ubiquity on mobile devices, malign gamblers’ willingness to threaten athletes on social media and in person, and the use of emerging technology like artificial intelligence, augmented reality tools, and more.
My proposal is not a new law or a whiz-bang tech tool, but rather an information sharing hub housed in a non-profit entity funded by the four major sports leagues and the NCAA (or College Sports Commission) along with the two to three largest sports books. Something similar was proposed in legislation back in 2018 around the time PASPA was overturned. Some of what that legislation proposed turned up in the private sector in the form of integrity monitors, but those are also siloed and only share information with their clients about problematic bets. The threats we see now go beyond just problematic bets and encompass problematic bettors. Addressing online harms are a key element of the hub and a key differentiator of the times in which we now find ourselves, to say nothing of the possibilities for information sharing with artificial intelligence.
I know this might sound like a quaint idea for an industry where revenue and profit almost always win out over everything else but stick with me. After all, even NBA Commissioner David Stern was able to convince his owners that information sharing was good for business back in the 1990’s with his TMBO initiative. And now look at where the NBA is as a global brand.
One of the main components of the current threat matrix is that overzealous bettors have begun threatening athletes. Sometimes it’s on social media and sometimes it’s in person. Sometimes it’s before a match to influence the outcome and sometimes it’s after a match to avenge their monetary loss. Regardless of the specific motivation it puts lots of people in danger and it tilts the notion of fair play. But when a bettor in Philadelphia shows up to a track meet to harass a sprinter before her race he may only be thrown out of that specific venue. In Philadelphia there are four major sports teams, countless universities with athletics departments plus other professional sports teams and nearby cities.
The threat calls for teams, leagues, betting platforms, social media companies and others to work together. Betting platforms collect a tremendous amount of data about their customers for anti-money laundering, ‘know-your-customer’ and other regulatory reasons. This information ought to be shared with the hub along with applicable social media identifiers that can be linked to an individual from publicly available information in accordance with all privacy laws and regulations. There needs to be information sharing among the leagues and venues to provide awareness of bad actors. The information sharing hub can also share best practices on a host of security topics ranging from incident response to cybersecurity and more.
There is also a serious incentive here for leagues, teams, and sports books. Until now when an incident occurs involving either fans with malign intent or athletes (akin to Jontay Porter) the leagues and sports books must answer questions about their business arrangements with sports books. “How can the NBA or NFL cash a sports books’ checks with one hand and claim to be for fair play with the other?” The sports integrity questions are fair game. But with an entity like this non-profit the risk for teams, leagues, sports books and others are largely shifted. The four major sports leagues plus the NCAA could hold board seats to set the strategic direction of the entity and provide a measure of oversight. But the group’s relative independence and remit to police malign intent in betting markets would allow leagues the ability to refer the handling of incidents to this group.
I do not envision a large bureaucracy for this entity either. I think positive results could be achieved with a small and nimble staff to administer the database, clearinghouse, and information sharing mechanisms, and perform simple open-source research along with maintaining a repository of best practices to improve the security posture of smaller leagues (e.g. the NWSL, ATP, MLS, PGA, or WTA).
This won’t solve every problem related to sports gambling or sports integrity. But it will show that leagues are serious about the problem of online harms and potential misuse of funds. It will show that they care at least as much about trying to maintain integrity as they do about their revenue streams from sports books. It will also require that leagues do something bold, something that perhaps rubs against their business intuition. In the end though, I think it will improve their product and show their customers that they are invested not only in their teams but also in their communities and fan bases.
I plan to use this framework to build out a more detailed governance structure for an entity that could carry out this mission, along with Key Performance Indicators and relevant case studies. If you are a team, league, operator, regulator, or other interested entity please feel free to reach out to me at SecureStakes@pm.me. I welcome any outreach to try to improve this idea as I think it has the potential to improve the safety, security, and integrity of the sports we all enjoy watching, whether on a screen or in person.