President Donald J. Trump waves to the crowd after participating in pre-game ceremonies Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, at the Army-Navy NCAA College football game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
President Donald Trump has maintained a feud with the NFL since before he even entered into politics, and now, according to The Hill, a major policy issue is setting the stage for a new phase of the conflict.
Trump's issues with the league, according to The Hill's Monday morning, date back to his four failed attempts to purchase a team, dating as far back as the early 1980s, when he failed to acquire the Baltimore Colts, and as recently as 2014, when he was outbid for the Buffalo Bills. After failing to get a hold of an NFL team, Trump once acquired the New Jersey Generals, a team in the ill-fated rival league, the USFL.
More recently, Trump has taken issue with the NFL for various reasons, including its occasional "social justice posture" that ran afoul of his MAGA agenda, and his distaste for its new kickoff rules, which were designed to protect players by reducing high-speed collisions. Trump has also privately suggested that the new stadium for the Washington Commanders should be named after himself, even threatening to complicate the building process otherwise.
Now, The Hill noted in its report that the future of the increasingly lucrative online sports gambling industry "is emerging as a potential new frontier in a long-standing era of tensions between President Trump and the NFL."
"Part of the reason for the NFL’s boom in the live sports marketplace is the legalization of online gambling and rising fan interest in fantasy sports," the report detailed. "The country’s most followed professional league by a wide margin, the NFL is navigating a sports media landscape increasingly driven by daily online wagering. The league’s growth through gambling comes at a time when the federal government is facing intensifying questions about game integrity and the potential public health risks tied to habitual wagering, particularly among younger fans."
It continued: "Prediction markets, which pose a competitive threat to the top online sportsbooks that do big business with the NFL, have received the backing of the Trump administration in court as they face state-level legal challenges and work to fend off regulation. It’s all leading to a potential showdown between the NFL and [the] Trump administration in a heated debate over what constitutes sports gambling and how a booming industry essential to the league’s bottom line should be regulated."
"There’s always a really good chance that any relationship between Trump and other powerful people is going to result in some friction, especially when there’s history of them keeping him out of the [NFL owners] club,” Atlantic journalist Mark Leibovich told The Hill. “And he knows he has leverage over them. It does seem like sports gambling is the clear and present existential threat to football. They’ve always been terrified of it, but now they’re in bed with it.”
The Trump Justice Department has also been weighing recently the possibility of a "probe into the NFL’s media rights dealmaking and the antitrust exemption" rules that allow for its special arrangements. The FCC, meanwhile, is considering an investigation into "how online sportsbooks market themselves," a move that "was seen by many sports and business observers as directly related to the government’s potential scrutiny of the NFL’s media rights strategy."