D.C. council member Kenyan R. McDuffie announced the Sports Wagering Amendment Act of 2024 on Wednesday hoping to overhaul the current D.C. sports betting licensing system and allow for sports venues and teams to offer citywide mobile sports betting.
This comes just 10 days after it was confirmed that FanDuel would take over as the single source for online sports betting in D.C., replacing Intralot-run GambetDC which has been riddled with issues.
Expanding the market
Although the FanDuel move should undoubtedly offer a better experience for those sports betting in D.C., McDuffie has noted that it still won’t allow city gamblers to choose among a number of online sports betting sites as they can in many states. He said, according to The Washington Post, it could hamper District businesses that have invested in on-site retail sportsbooks, which includes the FanDuel Sportsbook at Audi Field, the Caesars Sportsbook at Capital One Arena, and the BetMGM sportsbook at Nationals Park.
Technically, Caesars and BetMGM both offer mobile platforms that are restricted to a two-block radius around their respective facilities, but that still limits the options of D.C. bettors and pales in comparison to how accessible online sportsbooks are in the neighboring markets of Maryland and Virginia. McDuffie’s new legislation would remove that geographical restriction and would also create a new type of mobile sports betting license available to the teams that play at the venues with existing sportsbooks. This could open the door for the NHL's Washington Capitals, NBA's Washington Wizards, and MLB's Washington Nationals to all get in on the action with the mobile betting platforms of their choosing.
Key factors of the legislation
Here are some other core details of the Sports Wagering Amendment Act of 2024:
- These special licenses for sports teams would double as an incentive for the teams to remain in the District and continue investing in the city, an important factor considering Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis is actively trying to move his teams out of the city.
- The new mobile licenses would be more expensive and taxed at a higher rate than the two existing retail-based licenses.
- The bill revives an attempt to dedicate $300,000 in annual sports betting revenue towards responsible gaming and harm reduction initiatives, while also putting $1 million annually into a new “Youth Extracurricular Investment Fund” to boost out-of-school programming.
What’s next
The council will also be considering whether to extend Intralot’s contract to be the D.C. Lottery’s prime contractor for sports betting, which expires in mid-July. McDuffie expressed at a January hearing that he would not support the extension of Intralot’s contract just on the basis of giving the updated plan with FanDuel more time to get up and running. The Washington Post also cited McDuffie as saying that FanDuel’s addition to D.C. sports betting “fixes some of the obvious operational gaps with the GambetDC app, but it does so without addressing other important concerns like the broader competitive options for consumers.”
A 2022 bill that was ultimately unsuccessful tried to take a more wholesale approach to increasing the number of online sports betting sites in D.C. while terminating Intralot’s contract, so we will see how this latest legislation goes.
“I’m working toward a bill because the system and the program that they put in place simply doesn’t work,” asserted McDuffie about how this new act can help to address many of the dissatisfactions plaguing the D.C. sports betting market since its inception.
The numbers don’t lie
D.C. lawmakers projected that the GambetDC operation would produce $84 million in tax revenue since 2022, yet it has only mustered a measly $4.3 million in its lifetime. Technical problems, poor odds, and overall dissatisfaction with the experience has marred the sportsbook’s reputation within the District, and overall handle declined significantly year-over-year from $216.2 million in 2022 to $169.7 million in 2023.
