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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I think betting is likely to have an unusually negative economic impact on the players. Loss avoidance means people are more likely to remember players ‘underperforming’ expectations than exceeding them. That’s going to have a negative impact on their marketability as paid sponsors independent of actual performance.

It’s questionable if they can win, but demonstrating damages may be the easiest part of this case.

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I think proving a specific instance of lost sponsorship income to the satisfaction of a court is going to be extraordinarily difficult, especially if the argument is that consumers draw more adverse inferences from commercial datasets (which they generally don't have access to themselves; betting companies use them to help set the odds) than watching the matches.

Even more so when the context is that virtually any employer of professional footballers derives some of their revenue from betting, and betting companies are the primary sponsors of half the English Premier League teams and the English Football League organization

You can demonstrate harm without showing specific damages. Damaging someone’s reputation for example isn’t acceptable.

It’s the same basic principle as speeding or drunk driving being illegal even if nobody was actually harmed, putting people at significant risk of harm is not acceptable.

Isn't the harm to the players' reputations coming from their own quality of play in publicly viewed matches?

In my opinion a third party would only be liable for harming their reputation if the statistics being published were untrue.

It’s a team sport so they don’t optimize for fantasy leagues. If they are pulled to avoid risk of injury on a blowout their stats look worse. Essentially, a 2:0 win could look worse than a 2:3 loss.

In effect their a RNG that happens to make people dislike them.

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