Thursday’s news regarding the latest, and to date most consequential, NBA gambling scandal has brought unprecedented focus to the various problems flowing from legalized, normalized, and heavily monetized sports wagering.

The biggest problem rarely if ever is discussed.

Craig Carton, whose gambling issues previously resulted in incarceration, recently expressed a valid concern regarding the NFL’s looming acquisition of a 10-percent equity stake in ESPN.

“ESPN needs to divest immediately from ESPN Bet, and here’s why,” Carton said Friday, via Sean Keely of AwfulAnnouncing.com. “The NFL owns a piece of ESPN, meaning by default, they own a piece of the sportsbook. Well, you can’t have it both ways, because if the NFL benefits from you losing your wager, then they’re incentivized to control the outcome of games, because it means more money in their pockets.

“Meaning they have a financially vested interest now in you losing whatever wager you make on NFL games. Meaning it’s more likely for someone to say, ‘Hey, if there’s a gazillion dollars on Team X to cover, it’s in our best interest that they don’t cover. Make sure the referees call a game a certain way.’ Now, I’m taking liberties there, of course, but that’s the problem. When you want people to never question your integrity, you can’t own a piece of a sportsbook, and they do.”

On the surface, Carton’s concerns aren’t technically accurate. ESPN does not own ESPN Bet; PENN Entertainment operates the entity, and ESPN licenses its name to PENN. (That said, ESPN received PENN stock options as part of the deal, allowing ESPN to acquire partial ownership of PENN.)

Also, the NFL does not yet own 10 percent of ESPN. That deal requires the approval of the federal government, and there’s no guarantee approval will ever be given. It’s currently possible, if not likely, that the ESPN Bet arrangement will end before the NFL-ESPN is approved (if it ever is).

That said, Carton’s concerns ring true, for a different reason. NFL owners currently are allowed to own a piece of any company that operates a sportsbook. As the league told PFT in February 2024: “An owner would be able to hold up to 5 percent in entities that generate revenue from sports betting operations, provided the individual has no involvement in management of the company (such as an officer or director or in a management role).”

In other words, independent of the league’s looming 10-percent stake in ESPN (and, in turn, a piece of PENN), NFL owners are permitted to separately and directly own a piece of the “house.” In theory, up to five percent of every “house.”

Any of them. All of them. For every owner of every team.

And here’s the problem. We don’t know which owners own how much of which companies that operate a sportsbook. We don’t know because the league has declined to share that information.

If, as it appears, the sports betting reckoning is beginning, one of the first things Congress, the media, and/or the general public should demand to know is the percent of every sportsbook that each NFL owner holds. It’s a fair question. It’s a critical question.

Within the zero-sum reality of NFL wins and losses, each owner has a direct interest in the performance of his or her team. Within the broader reality of sports betting, it’s possible that every owner has an indirect interest in the outcome of wagers on specific games that tilt, one way or the other, toward one team.

If multiple owners hold five percent of, say, DraftKings, and if the action on any given game becomes skewed to the point that DraftKings’ financial interests point toward one of the two teams winning the game and/or covering the spread, the concerns expressed by Carton become valid.

For now, there’s no way to know whether that’s the case, because there’s no transparency regarding which owners hold which percentage of which sportsbooks.

So, basically, Carton is right about the problem he has identified. But if goes much farther than ESPN Bet. And the reality is that the situation could be much worse than anyone knows. Because no one knows how pervasive the practice of owners owning up to five percent of sportsbook companies is.