“You have this completely unbelievable, upside-down situation,” said Carl Mergele, chief executive of Stats, a sports data and technology company that was founded in 1981. The company has been at the forefront of the statistical revolution in sports and, by its own measure, collects more than 30 million data points a year. (Stats provides live scores and statistics to The New York Times.)
Mr. Mergele said that while he was not referring to any specific competitor, if official data is mandated, it would likely be controlled by companies that fuel illicit markets. It would be affordable, he said, only to “those that monetize that data in the global betting market, often in unregulated, offshore, gray, illegal markets.”
For that reason, Mr. Mergele said, requiring the use of official data in sports betting would be “enabling the very people and companies that have been circumventing U.S. law.”
