Posted by Justin Cohen.
For years now, daily fantasy sports has been slowly growing but recently, it has been huge. Over the last two years, if you have watched a single sporting event, I cannot imagine you not seeing one of their ads. “Fanduel packs the thrill of a whole season into just one week” (Fanduel). They are everywhere.
According to Wired, DraftKings or Fanduel aired an ad on television every 90 seconds. “You only need to remind people of something that often if your target market is sports loving goldfish” (John Oliver). Daily fantasy sports combines everything guys love, sports and money. Although the multi-billion dollar industry is made up of thousands of companies, the two main sites, DraftKings and Fanduel are the main ones making significant profit. They were recently under investigation for being unfair and there were reports of people within the sites going in and changing their entries so they would be able to win every time.
Just the other day however, attorney general Schneiderman stated, “As I’ve said from the start, my job is to enforce the law, and starting today, DraftKings and FanDuel will abide by it.” So now, in New York and some other areas, people will not be able to play daily fantasy sports. Is this fair? Isn’t there more important things that he should be worrying about? These are questions I ask myself. Although fantasy sports used to be a game where you played with your coworkers and eventually lost to Janice in accounting, I like the path fantasy sports is headed with more interaction and more overall fun than just regular old fantasy sports.
I believe fantasy sport sites should be legal, but if it goes down that path, they need to declare themselves as a gambling site. In all interviews and ads regarding what the site is, they state it is an entertainment site, not a gambling site, which is why the general can make it illegal in New York. For the future, I can see this going two ways. In one scenario, I can see daily fantasy sports making a comeback, and becoming legal again. In the other scenario, the more likely scenario in my opinion, I can see it becoming illegal everywhere, which I am not looking forward to.
Justin is a sports management major at the Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, Class of 2018.