Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2015 December 16 - 22 [SOCIAL ISSUES]

Olympic Minister intends to expand sports gambling

The Olympic Minister has put forward the same old tired out plan to expand betting on professional sports games with the aim of collecting funds to construct a new national athletic stadium, the main venue for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

Olympic Minister Endo Toshiaki on December 18 told the press that a task force of a Dietmembers’ group for the promotion of sports will discuss a plan to introduce a rugby lottery and a basketball lottery in addition to the existing football lottery. The proceeds from the Japanese version of “football pools” are already earmarked for covering the construction cost of the new over-priced Olympic stadium.

A call for a wider coverage of sports betting has been tried and failed many times. The Dietmembers’ group in April proposed a plan to set up “baseball pools” but it fizzled out after the high-profile revelation in October that some professional baseball players had themselves involved in illegal baseball gambling.

Several years ago, the Dietmembers’ group considered legalizing betting on games at the Japan Rugby Top League, but this plan did not bear fruit as the number of spectators at rugby matches was still small at that time. However, as rugby’s popularity skyrocketed after Japan’s national team caused the biggest upset in the 2015 Rugby World Cup, the parliamentarians’ group proposed to launch sports betting on games at the southern hemisphere Super Rugby, in which a Japanese team will start to compete in 2016.

The Dietmembers are also considering making basketball a gambling sport as the men’s professional basketball league in Japan named the B League is scheduled to start its first season next autumn.

Sports gambling is believed to create an incentive for match-fixing even if it is legal. Promoting sports betting might lead to more gangsters trying to lure players into doing something illegal. The Olympic Minister is advocating the expansion of sports betting, which goes against the International Olympics Committee’s ongoing efforts to protect athletes from the influence of criminals.

In the first place, an increase in revenues from sports betting is not indispensable to cover the construction cost of the new national athletic stadium. The construction cost once ballooned to more than 250 billion yen under the previous design for the stadium, and this prompted some politicians to think that there is a need to collect more money from the football pools. However, the stadium design was completely revised and the new price tag for the construction work is now less than 150 billion yen. The national government should fulfill its responsibility to secure funding without relying on sports gambling which would deteriorate the ethical environment surrounding athletes.