Missouri sports teams come together to support sports betting legalization
Kansas City Chiefs and Royals headline teams campaigning to get Show-Me State voters to back legalizing sports betting
A number of sports teams across Missouri have launched a campaign to push for sports betting legislation after back-to-back years of setbacks.
The sports teams working together on this campaign are the St. Louis Cardinals, St. Louis Blues, St. Louis CITY SC, Kansas City Chiefs, Kansas City Royals, and the Kansas City Current.
The campaign has already received $250,000 donations from FanDuel and DraftKings according to a report from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The campaign in Show-Me State is aiming to try and convince lawmakers to legalize sports betting.
Over the past couple of years, bills to legalize sports betting have passed through the Missouri House successfully, only for them to be quashed in the Senate.
At the moment, Senator Tony Leutkemeyer, who was at the forefront of previous attempts to legalize sports betting, is spearheading the latest attempt to get the bill over the line.
Under the proposed bill SB 852, the state’s riverboat casinos and professional sports teams would serve as the primary license holders, with riverboats permitted to partner with up to three online operators while sports teams will be allowed one operator partner.
Licenses would cost $100,000 and would need to be renewed every four years, with gross operator revenue taxed at 12%.
Promotional deductions would begin at 100% in year one before the phasing in of annual 25% deductions.
In a release, St Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III said: “As we are not optimistic that this pattern will change during the upcoming legislative session, we are currently proceeding with an initiative petition campaign to put the issue of legalized sports wagering on the ballot for Missouri voters in 2024, and, beginning this week, we are launching our campaign and will be collecting signatures to support this initiative petition.”
To make the ballot, supporters have until May 8 to garner enough signatures from voters equal to 5% of the vote for governor in 2020 in each of the six congressional districts. This means that the campaign needs between 171,592 and 188,537 signatures, depending on which districts are chosen.
The release stated that the sports betting market in Missouri is already a lucrative one, with “recent estimates suggest that Missourians place roughly $2bn a year in bets using offshore gaming websites”.