Sports gambling in Missouri is officially live as of today, December 1. This moment has been a long time coming. Legislation was first introduced in 2018 in Jefferson City to allow legalized sports gambling in the Show-Me State, but the bill and its successors never made it all the way through the state Senate. Eventually, a ballot initiative was successfully submitted, and Missouri voters passed the legislation on November 5, 2024. The original goal for the Missouri Gaming Commission was to roll out legalized sports gambling by June, but these issues are complicated, and life is full of delays. The deadline to launch sports gambling was December 1, and nothing makes a project come together like a deadline, so the long wait is over for Missouri residents who want to gamble on sports and don’t want to drive across State Line Road to place bets on their phone.
The Kansas City Royals publicly supported Amendment 2 in a number of different ways. They released statements in support of the bill. They were part of a coalition, the “Winning for Missouri Education” campaign that collected signatures and encouraged voters to vote in favor of legalization. The Royals donated money, including $333,333 to the campaign right before the vote. Sluggerrr even helped deliver signatures to Jefferson City to get the initiative on the ballot.
The Royals were in line to reap the fruit of their labor. Back at the end of September, the team announced a multi-year partnership with Underdog that gave the sports gaming company market access to Missouri. In Missouri, for all but two companies, if you want to have a sports betting license, you need to be “tethered” to one of the professional sports teams or a casino. That tether includes some sort of revenue share between the gambling company and the professional sports team/casino.
On one level, I can see the logic of why the tether was written into the law. Fundamentally, the sports gambling companies rely on these sports to make their money. In many ways, their existence also makes things more complicated for the professional sports teams and players. The teams and leagues need to be on the lookout for more cheating and rigging of games, like what allegedly happened with Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz. The players also have to deal with more harassment on social media and in person, as some percentage of aggrieved gamblers are more than willing to express frustration with the fact that the future is unknowable, and that these players don’t meet their expectations and “lose” them money. Some money from the gambling companies flowing to the professional sports teams to help offset these costs does make some sense (although I’d be curious to know if any of the money ends up going to the players or is somehow considered non-baseball revenue).
Still, I have to admit to being squeamish about the idea of the Royals officially being involved in the sports gambling business as part of a direct revenue share. To put my cards on the table, I really don’t like the idea of being able to wager on sports directly from your phone. I think these companies are predatory and take advantage of a small percentage of the population to really make their money, and are actively harming our society.
I was able to vote on the ballot initiative in 2024 and voted against it. My compromise position would be to completely ban mobile gambling and only allow sports wagering at casinos, and increasingly, I’m wishing there was a feasible way to shove all the sports gambling stuff back into Pandora’s box. At the pace I’m radicalizing on this issue, you might find me in a few years swinging a hatchet Carrie Nation style at people’s phones when I see their gambling apps open. You may as well prep me a headstone in Belton and name a sportsbook in my honor.
I also realize that my hands are not completely clean in all of this mess either. I do receive a stipend from Vox Media for writing at Royals Review, and Vox has business partnerships with FanDuel and DraftKings. It’s not an easy time to make money writing on the internet about sports, and in some ways, the gambling revenue flowing to media companies through these partnerships are helping prop up the entire industry in a way that benefits me personally. I personally haven’t volunteered to send my monthly stipend to an organization that helps problem gamblers to help offset some of this. This is a collective industry issue, and in a small way, I’m benefiting from what I perceive as wrong. Such is the price of living in a society, but I do think it is worth mentioning.
The original intent of this article was to warn against the dangers of the Royals directly receiving gaming revenue. The team already financially benefits from sports gambling in multiple ways. Gambling companies are willing to throw lots of advertising dollars around, which the Royals and other professional sports teams in Missouri can collect. There is also allegedly more interest in Royals games with legalized gambling than without it, which helps them financially over time.
I think sports teams receiving direct revenue from gambling companies sets up conflicting incentives and sets up an increased potential for bad actors to operate. We are setting up a system that requires ethical operators to keep up a firewall between the teams and the gambling companies, despite some percentage of direct revenue flowing from the operators to the teams. It’s possible that the percentage is so small that no one on the team side is going to do something risky and unethical to help the gambling companies make more money, so in turn the team can directly benefit as well. Life, however, has taught me that bad actors, eventually, will end up in positions that require good actors, and we all suffer the consequences when that happens, particularly when the system is not built to sniff out the bad actors or limit their potential impact.
Something interesting, however, happened as I was in the process of formulating and writing this article. Underdog, just two months after announcing their multi-year partnership with the Kansas City Royals, withdrew their application for a sports betting license from the Missouri Gaming Commission. As of right now, that means the Royals, who at least publicly worked as hard as any team to pass this law, will not be receiving any direct revenue from sports gambling.
Underdog proudly advertises itself as the “the fastest-growing sports company in the U.S.” The company was ranked by LinkedIn as the #3 Startup in the U.S. in 2025. It received a $1.23 billion valuation from Spark Capital and raised at least $70 million in Series C Funding this year. Founder Jeremy Levine has large ambitions for the company and isn’t afraid to let people know about them. It’s easy to see what was appealing about Underdog for the Royals, especially since they already had a pre-existing relationship around advertising for events like “Bark at the Park.” Underdog has proven they are a successful up-and-comer in the fantasy sports space, and making the transition to sports gambling from the fantasy sports like FanDuel and DraftKings seemed like a natural next step.
Underdog, however, appears to be heading in a different direction. The company announced on September 2nd, before they announced their partnership with the Royals, a partnership with Crypto.com and their affiliate Derivatives North America. This partnership allows sports events contracts to be purchased through Crypto.com with Underdog and their proprietary technology powering the prices on the derivatives contracts.
Here’s a quick summary of sportsbooks versus prediction markets from Gemini AI that I thought was very helpful (if you want to dive deeper, both this article and this article have longer explanations and examples of how things look different between a sportsbook and a prediction market.)
Sports betting involves placing a wager against a bookmaker’s fixed odds, while prediction markets operate more like a stock market where participants trade contracts with prices that fluctuate based on public sentiment and market activity…The core distinction is that sportsbooks act as the counterparty, setting the rules and prices to guarantee a profit, while prediction markets function as an open exchange where users trade positions directly with each other.
It seemed like Underdog was going to operate in both the prediction market and sports betting space, but with them pulling out of their sports gambling application in Missouri, they appear to be all-in on the prediction market. Levine has been vocal about his desire to create a stock market for sports; his first company StarStreet was a failed attempt to do so, which caused him to transition to fantasy sports. This idea, however, has clearly animated Levine and the team at Underdog. Mike Leara, the executive director of the Missouri Gaming Commission, told Mark Zinn of Fox2NOW:
“They have decided to go to that market,” Leara said. “It’s not regulated at any level compared to what traditional sports betting is regulated, and obviously, there’s no tax on it.”
There’s a fascinating legal story about all of this that goes beyond our purview of this article (I found this Substack on the regulatory fighting that is going on about all of this between to be fascinating and informative, along with this ESPN article). As far as the Royals are concerned, however, their partner in the gambling space abandoned them at the altar to go pursue what could be a direct competitor (although prediction markets are not eating into sports gambling revenues, yet). Underdog no longer has to share revenue with the Royals, pay a 10% tax to the State of Missouri, and presents a different option for gamblers that will be different from whatever gambling entity the Royals do end up partnering with, presuming they end up partnering with one at all. Their timing of this decision also leaves the Royals without a partner, and all of the other current applicants have partnered with a different professional sports organization in Missouri, right when this is all about to begin. I’m willing to guess that there are some very hard feelings from the Royals towards Underdog about their decision, specifically the timing of how it all went down.
I must admit that I feel some sense of schadenfreude towards the Royals about all of this. I personally don’t trust any of the companies operating in the gambling/prediction market business to look out for anyone’s or anything’s interests other than their own. Underdog may be based out of Brooklyn, but they seem to be copying the “move fast and break things,” motto that has proven to be disturbingly successful. The Royals just happened to be on the wrong end of that decision-making process this time, even after jumping in bed with the company.
Still, I also feel some sympathy towards the team of people on the Royals who helped bring this deal together. Unless we get public information that this was always an understood possibility, I’m sure the team wasn’t expecting Underdog to go through all the work of working out a deal with the team and submitting the application for a mobile gambling license only to pull out at the last minute. Betrayal is, unfortunately, a core part of the human experience, and while we don’t have all the information available to us about what happened, it does look like Underdog, at the very least, abandoned the Royals at the 11th hour on a project that the team has dumped a ton of time, effort, and money into. Even if I think the joint project they were working on is a net negative for our society, that is far from a universally shared opinion, and the Royals have been operating under the democratically instituted legal framework for all of this. Gambling is a cutthroat business, and right now the Royals are trying to staunch a wound.
I’m curious to see if this decision by Underdog changes the Royals’ offseason plans at all, or how we will know if it does. Does the business side of the organization have time and space to renegotiate another deal right now, with the stadium situation still outstanding? Will the Royals’ payroll situation change since they will no longer be receiving this gambling revenue? The team has never received gambling revenue before and seems like they are doing just fine financially, but I would assume their 2026 revenue projections included some money from a gambling partner that, as of right now, is up in the air.
It will be interesting to see what the next move for the Royals is. Can they lure a company like BetRiver or Hard Rock Bet to jump into the mobile sports gambling space in Missouri? How long will that process take? I’m sure the Royals would love to have a gambling partner in time for the Super Bowl. Will they try to lure FanDuel away from St. Louis City or bet365 from the St. Louis Cardinals? Regardless if they have another tethered partner, will the team have some other gambling partner advertising throughout the stadium?
Or when we go to Kauffman Stadium in 2026, we will see Underdog as the Official Sports Prediction Market Parter of the Kansas City Royals? There’s money to be made after all, so maybe this will all become water under the bridge on the way to a brave new future in separating people from their money.