It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be.
Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals.
Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.
Isn't there rules about anyone in a sport (players, managers, referees...) not being allowed to bet? I work with people who are not allowed to trade commodities because they are in a division where people who make those commodities store data that isn't yet public knowledge. The SEC knows who those people are and the list is sent to every broker to ensure they can't trade.
If sports betting isn't checking on this and cracking down there is a major problem.
As far as I know there's no central regulatory authority like the SEC. Every sport has its own Commission or Committee in charge, and many of them are profit motivated in weird conflict-of-interest ways that a government regulatory agency shouldn't be.
In college sports alone the NCAA has been (badly) wandering from scandal to scandal for decades and dealing with the repercussions in increasingly baroque individual judgements (some schools are too big/make too much money to punish; other schools seem to be punished too much as scapegoats in their place), and increasingly strange forfeits and legislation-impacted regulations (such as the NIL system [Name-Image-Likeness] reshaping a lot of what used to be illegal in college sports ten years ago into a game [lit.] changing new sluice of money). Given how much the NCAA is dealing with all those scandals and the fresh regulatory burden of NIL, sports betting is probably not even on their radar until someone with too much power at the FBI says it is and picks a scapegoat school to suffer for the rest.
It gets back to why there's so much debate that the MLB should either clean up its current act, or reverse older decisions against sports betting players. There's no right answer, and it is as much a question of how much of a regulatory body does the MLB want to be against sports betting in a year where most states have now made it legal in one form or another.
Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals.
Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.