More than 100 years ago, prosecutors tried—and failed—to convict eight members of the Chicago White Sox for intentionally losing the 1919 World Series. The eight players, dubbed the “Black Sox,” were acquitted by a Chicago jury after less than three hours of deliberation. The government’s inexplicable loss of confessions from multiple players—and those players’ subsequent recantations before trial—largely undermined the case.
In the years since, much has changed in sports, gambling, and the law. Yet match-fixing prosecutions remain rare. In many respects, the reason is the same one that doomed the Black Sox case: Absent confessions, it is exceedingly difficult to prove intentional underperformance. Even the best players miss pitches, commit errors, and lose games. Average players do so even more often. Distinguishing ordinary variation from wrongdoing—or even reasonably speculating about it—is typically infeasible, leaving law enforcement and prosecutors with little basis to begin, much less successfully complete, a criminal investigation.
Nonetheless, with sports betting now both legal and ubiquitous, federal interest in gambling prosecutions has grown. For the first time in history, dozens of current and former players in the NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association (CBA), NBA, and MLB are under simultaneous indictment for gambling-related charges. Each of these indictments involve a different type of “fix,” but the prosecutions’ core theory is the same in each: players took money to help gamblers perform better.In the NCAA/CBA indictment, for example, the government alleges that a group of defendants known as “fixers” paid players between $10,000 and $30,000 per game to shave points. According to prosecutors, the scheme did not involve intentionally losing games in an obvious manner, as the Black Sox did. Instead, players allegedly performed only slightly below expectations—enough to win the game, but not cover the point spread.