Every Major Betting Scandal in Sports History

Sports betting has been legal in most of the United States since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling. Sportsbooks advertise during every commercial break. Your phone can place a bet in 10 seconds. But corruption in sports gambling is not new - it's been happening since the very first games were played for money. What's changed is the sophistication, the stakes, and the surveillance.

I've put together every major betting scandal in sports history, ranked by severity, with the key figures, the money involved, and the fallout. Some of these stories involve organized crime. Some involve desperate athletes. Some involve the very people hired to ensure the games are fair. All of them remind us that where there's money and competition, corruption is never far behind.

🕵️ The Complete Scandal Rankings

🔥 The Five Biggest Scandals in Detail

If you only know one betting scandal in all of sports, this is probably it. Eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein, one of the most powerful organized crime figures in American history.

The scheme was hatched by first baseman Chick Gandil, who had connections to gamblers. The White Sox players were underpaid and resentful of notoriously cheap owner Charles Comiskey, and the promise of a $100,000 payout (roughly $1.8 million today) was enough to get eight of them on board. The fix was messy - some players reportedly tried harder than others, and the Reds may have won anyway - but the damage was catastrophic.

All eight players were acquitted in a 1921 trial (key evidence conveniently disappeared), but newly appointed commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned them all for life anyway. The most famous of the eight was "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, a career .356 hitter who many believed was too talented and too illiterate to have been a willing participant. His Hall of Fame eligibility was a debate that lasted over a century.

Point-shaving scandals involving players are one thing. A referee actively betting on and manipulating games he's officiating is something else entirely. Tim Donaghy officiated over 700 NBA games across 13 seasons, and for at least four of those seasons (2003-2007), he was betting on games he worked.

The scheme escalated in late 2006 when Donaghy's childhood friend James "The Sheep" Battista struck a deal: Donaghy would receive $2,000 for each correct "prediction" on the outcome of a game he officiated. Donaghy wasn't just predicting based on inside knowledge - an ESPN investigation later found he was adjusting his foul calls to influence point spreads. The FBI caught wind of the operation, and in summer 2007, the story broke. NBA commissioner David Stern called it the worst crisis in the league's history.

Donaghy pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. He was fined $500,000. But the real damage was to the NBA's credibility. To this day, whenever fans complain about referee bias, Donaghy's name comes up. He later wrote a book and has commented publicly during every subsequent NBA gambling investigation, seemingly enjoying his role as the sport's most infamous whistleblower-villain hybrid.

In May 2006, just weeks before Italy would win the World Cup in Germany, wiretapped phone conversations revealed that the most powerful club in Italian football had been systematically rigging matches by manipulating referee appointments. The scandal was dubbed "Calciopoli" - a play on "Tangentopoli" (Bribesville), the name given to Italy's massive political corruption scandal of the 1990s.

At the center was Luciano Moggi, Juventus's general manager, who had built a network of influence over the officials responsible for assigning referees to matches. The tapes showed Moggi pressuring officials to assign favorable referees to Juventus games - referees who were more likely to make calls in the Old Lady's favor. Four clubs were implicated in total: Juventus, AC Milan, Lazio, and Fiorentina.

The punishment was unprecedented. Juventus, the most successful club in Italian football history with the largest fan base in the country, was stripped of two Serie A titles (2004-05 and 2005-06), relegated to Serie B (the second division), and docked points. Moggi and CEO Antonio Giraudo were both banned for life. AC Milan was docked 30 points. Fiorentina and Lazio initially faced relegation too, though this was overturned on appeal.

The aftermath was staggering. Star players fled Juventus like rats from a sinking ship: Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Patrick Vieira went to Inter Milan, Fabio Cannavaro went to Real Madrid, Lilian Thuram went to Barcelona. But others stayed. Gianluigi Buffon, Alessandro Del Piero, and Pavel Nedved all chose to play in Serie B. Del Piero's famous quote: "I am a Juventus player, and I will remain one whatever happens." Juventus bounced right back, winning Serie B easily and eventually winning nine consecutive Serie A titles from 2012 to 2020.

Pete Rose's numbers are absurd: 4,256 career hits (the all-time record), 17 All-Star selections, 3 World Series rings, 3 batting titles. He was called "Charlie Hustle" because of his relentless playing style. He should be in the Hall of Fame. He isn't, because he bet on baseball.

An MLB investigation led by lawyer John Dowd found that Rose had bet on at least 52 Reds games in 1987 while managing the team, placing bets through a network of associates. In 1989, facing the evidence, Rose agreed to accept a permanent place on baseball's ineligible list - a lifetime ban from the sport. In exchange, MLB agreed to make no formal finding in its investigation. Rose denied gambling on baseball for 15 years before finally admitting it in his 2004 autobiography, then later admitting he had also bet on games as a player.

Rose applied for reinstatement multiple times and was rejected every time. He died in September 2024 at age 83, never having been inducted into the Hall of Fame. In 2025, commissioner Rob Manfred removed Rose and other deceased players from the permanently ineligible list, but whether the Hall of Fame voters will actually elect him remains an open question.

Hansie Cronje was a South African national hero. He captained the Proteas to 27 Test wins and 99 ODI victories. He was the face of South African cricket after the country's return from apartheid-era isolation. Then Delhi police released wiretapped phone recordings that shattered everything.

In April 2000, recordings emerged of Cronje speaking with Indian bookmaker Sanjay Chawla about fixing results during South Africa's tour of India. Cronje initially denied everything - "the allegations are completely without substance," he said. Four days later, he confessed. The King Commission inquiry that followed revealed that Cronje had been accepting bribes from bookmakers since 1996, receiving approximately $100,000 total. He had offered teammates Herschelle Gibbs $15,000 to score under 20 runs, and Henry Williams $15,000 to concede over 50 runs in a specific match.

The most infamous incident was the 2000 Centurion Test against England, where Cronje engineered a contrived result by convincing both teams to forfeit their second innings - creating a dramatic finish that the bookmakers had paid for. It was disguised as sporting generosity. It was actually corruption.

Cronje was banned for life in October 2000. He died less than two years later, at age 32, when the cargo plane he was traveling in crashed into mountains near George, South Africa. The crash was ruled as pilot error, but conspiracy theories linking his death to betting syndicates have persisted ever since. A later investigation revealed Cronje had more than 70 undeclared bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, suggesting the match-fixing was far more extensive than anyone publicly admitted.

📱 The Modern Era: Betting Goes Legal and Scandals Keep Coming

The Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018. Since then, 38+ states have legalized some form of sports wagering. The industry generates billions. Sportsbooks are official partners of the leagues themselves. And the scandals haven't slowed down - they've just changed shape.

🏀 College Basketball's Dirty History

College sports have been a magnet for fixing because the athletes are unpaid (or barely paid), making them more susceptible to bribes. College basketball has been hit hardest, with three major point-shaving scandals spanning seven decades.

📊 Scandals By Sport

📈 Timeline of Major Scandals

🔍 The Pattern: Why They Keep Happening

After covering sports betting for as long as I have, I can tell you that every scandal follows the same basic recipe. The ingredients never change - only the amounts.

🤔 The Ultimate Irony

Here's what kills me. For decades, the major American sports leagues fought sports betting legalization tooth and nail. The NFL acted like gambling was an existential threat. The NBA lobbied against it. MLB banned Pete Rose for it. And now? FanDuel is an "Official Sports Betting Partner of MLB." DraftKings has deals with the NFL. The NBA's own app links to sportsbooks. The leagues went from treating gambling as a mortal sin to making it a revenue stream in about five years flat.

The argument for legalization was always that legal, regulated betting would be easier to monitor than underground gambling. And there's some truth to that - the Jontay Porter scandal was caught precisely because legal sportsbooks flagged the suspicious activity and reported it to the NBA. In the old days, that bet would have been placed with an illegal bookie and nobody would have known.

But the counter-argument has teeth too. More money in the system means more temptation. More prop bets mean more opportunities to manipulate. More sportsbook partnerships mean more conflicts of interest. The 2025 FBI arrests suggest the underground gambling world didn't go away when betting went legal - it just adapted.

📅 Quick Timeline: 100+ Years of Scandal