Recently, there was a lot of growing optimism among the players and sources around the league that the end of the NFL Lockout was close at hand.
Daniel Kaplan of the Sports Business Journal tweeted that among owners, there was a feeling that a deal was not closed. According to ESPN’s Chris Mortensen, the formula for a revenue split between the owners and the players has been turned down by the owners.
According to an ESPN report, the players believe the owners’ proposal would leave them with roughly a 45 percent take on revenue, which they believe is an “unacceptable” amount and one that one player source said according to ESPN, “sets us back to March 11 … before the lockout.”
The bottom line is that, there’s still no certainty that there will be a 2012 NFL and now with a the current situation with the NBA, there’s no certainty that there will be a 2012 NBA season after the NBA locked out it’s players.
It amounts to a whole bunch of bad news for the gaming industry with two of the major North American professional sports mired in labour stoppages. The situation that is unfolding could be tragic as far as gambling revenue is concerned.
Football is king when it comes to sports betting and NBA basketball is queen, sadly, for now the royal sports monarchy has been abolished. Sportsbooks will definitely have to come up with new strategies moving forward and prepare for the worst case scenario, the possibility that both the NBA and NFL seasons could be cancelled.
Time to up baseball offerings, hell, it might even be time to start offering more MLS and women’s sports, it’s time to offer more of everything, bettors need to bet on something.
