How Much Does Sports Gambling Affect Results and Are DraftKings & Co. Responsible?

By now, legalized sports betting is woven into the broadcast fabric: odds crawl across the screen, same-game parlays are sponsored segments, and pregame shows toggle seamlessly between analysis and wagers. That ubiquity raises two urgent questions. First: Does gambling meaningfully tilt the outcomes of actual games? Second: if it does—or even if it plausibly could—how much responsibility sits with the sportsbooks powering this economy, notably DraftKings and its peers?

What the data says about manipulation

Integrity monitors that track global wagering patterns offer a sobering but clarifying baseline: suspected manipulation is rare in percentage terms, but it’s not trivial in volume. Sportradar’s 2023 integrity report found a suspected manipulation rate of 0.21% across monitored events —roughly 1 in every 467 —resulting in 1,329 suspicious matches worldwide. No single sport exceeded a 1% suspicious-match ratio, and 99.5% of events showed no suspicious betting at all.

In 2024, the picture improved: Sportradar reported a notable decline in suspicious matches, led by soccer, where flagged events fell 18%, from 881 in 2023 to 721 in 2024 (with Europe showing a 34% drop). That’s encouraging

, but hundreds of potentially compromised contests still represent a large absolute number.

Tennis illustrates the same dual reality. The sport generates routine enforcement headlines, with players and officials suspended for betting violations and match-fixing, yet top-tier events remain largely clean. The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) reported 101 match alerts in 2023, with none at Grand Slams; still, several players received multi-year bans in 2024–25 for fixing or betting offenses.

Bottom line: Integrity threats are measurable, not ubiquitous. As more shares of events can still erode trust if the cases are high-profile or if markets, like player props, are easier to influence than full-game results.

Where the risk really lives: prop bets and inside information

Two recent NBA cases crystallize the problem. In April 2024, the NBA banned Jontay Porter for life after concluding that he intentionally limited his participation and leaked health information to tilt player prop outcomes. Unusual betting triggered alarms and froze a large parlay; the investigation found Porter also placed bets on NBA games via an associate’s account.

In October 2025, federal indictments alleged a broader network that used inside injury and lineup intel to profit from NBA props; authorities dubbed it “insider trading in professional basketball.” Sportsbooks, including DraftKings and FanDuel, were not accused of orchestrating the scheme; prosecutors described them as victims defrauded by illicit information flows. The NBA placed implicated personnel on leave while reiterating concerns about the vulnerability of prop markets.

College sports show a different but related pressure point: bettor harassment of athletes. After a wave of documented abuse during championship events, Ohio regulators banned college player-prop bets in 2024 at the NCAA’s request; subsequent NCAA studies in 2024–25 found that betting-related abuse remains common, even as overall online abuse has begun to decline with new enforcement tools.

Takeaway: The riskiest edges of the market are player-level props susceptible to micro-manipulation (shortened minutes, early “illness,” insider injury status) and the corrosive social fallout of a bettor-centric culture around amateur athletes. That’s less about point-shaving a final score and more about gaming the margins.

Do sportsbooks like DraftKings make it worse or catch the bad actors?

It’s both. Regulated operators are part of the problem space (they popularize wagering products and plaster the ecosystem with marketing). Still, they’re also central to the solution (they provide the data and alerts that expose anomalies).

On the accountability side:

• Mandatory monitoring & reporting. State rules generally require licensed books to deploy independent integrity monitoring, share data with leagues and regulators, and maintain robust KYC/AML controls. The American Gaming Association highlights these obligations as core to why regulated markets are safer than offshore alternatives.

• Detection in practice. Several high-profile probes began with alerts raised by sportsbooks and integrity vendors. In the Alabama baseball case (2023), abnormal wagering on an LSU–Alabama game led to a rapid state-by-state halt and, later, NCAA sanctions against Alabama’s head coach for sharing insider info with a bettor. Surveillance video and bet-level telemetry were decisive.

• NBA cases. Coverage of the 2025 federal investigation underscores that sportsbooks were treated as victims and cooperating parties, not perpetrators, with companies emphasizing that regulated markets’ transparency helped uncover the schemes, echoing the earlier Porter case, where oddsmakers’ red flags were instrumental.

On the complicity side:

• Product design choices. Aggressive expansion of player-prop menus increases integrity risk because those bets can be nudged without a whole team conspiracy. NBA leaders and the NBPA have begun publicly questioning whether specific props should be restricted.

• Marketing saturation. The normalization of betting content (odds segments in broadcasts, in-app boosts, campus-adjacent promos) creates externalities—especially around college sports, where athletes have less power and face more harassment. Regulators and the NCAA have responded with partial prop bans and education campaigns, but the incentives remain strong.

Verdict: DraftKings and peers are responsible for mitigation, not culpable for manipulation they neither direct nor desire. Their legal obligations (and reputational incentives) align with detecting and reporting corruption. But they also shape the risk surface through what they offer and how aggressively they promote it—especially in prop-driven markets.

The global view: rare, persistent, and policed by data

Zooming out, the integrity story is increasingly data-driven. Systems that monitor odds across hundreds of operators in real time can flag improbable price movements, correlated props, and suspicious bet timing against private information (e.g., pre-announced injuries that aren’t public yet). That’s how most modern cases are caught.

While soccer and tennis still generate the most alerts worldwide, 2024’s drop in suspicious matches suggests deterrence is improving as monitoring scales and sanctions bite. Still, the scale of the sports calendar means that “rare” in percentage terms can translate to hundreds of dubious events per year, which is plenty to damage public trust if the headlines cluster.

What should change next?

1) Narrow the riskiest prop markets. Leagues and regulators should tighten or remove specific player-prop categories most vulnerable to micro-manipulation (e.g., minute-based unders for fringe rotation players), particularly in college sports. Ohio’s 2024 ban provides a workable model.

2) Standardize national integrity protocols. The U.S. remains a patchwork. A uniform baseline, rapid cross-state alerting, shared watchlists, and consistent reporting thresholds would close gaps exploited by insiders hopping jurisdictions. Recent probes show how quickly state-by-state halts can work; a national framework would make them faster.

3) Expand “insider information” rules. The NBA cases highlight how injury intel can corrupt prop markets even without overt match-fixing. Leagues should broaden the definition of material non-public information, tighten dissemination controls (fewer unauthorized staff touchpoints), and enforce stiff, public penalties.

4) Protect athletes—especially students. Continue to ban college player props, invest in harassment detection and law-enforcement referrals, and give schools resources to triage threats in real time. Early 2025 data shows targeted abuse can be reduced with credible enforcement and transparency.

5) Hold operators to measurable integrity KPIs. Suppose sportsbooks argue that regulated markets reduce corruption. In that case, they should publish annual integrity metrics (alert rates, time-to-escalation, cooperation stats) and submit to independent audits, turning a PR claim into an accountability regime.

So, does betting change results?

It can, particularly at the margins, through player-prop manipulation and insider information. The probability of any given event being compromised remains low, but the consequences —competitive distortion, reputational harm, and collateral damage to athletes —are significant.

As for responsibility: Yes, DraftKings and similar operators bear responsibility to prevent and detect corruption because they design the markets, see the data first, and profit from the ecosystem. But recent cases also show that regulated books, working with integrity firms and leagues, are often how we catch the problem. The correct answer isn’t pretending gambling can be scrubbed from sports; it’s narrowing high-risk products, strengthening information controls, standardizing integrity rules, and demanding transparent industry-wide reporting.

Do that, and fans can trust that what decides games is still mostly what it should be: talent, tactics, luck—and not a text about someone’s sore calf fifteen minutes before tip.