Although sports betting in Florida has not been active since late 2021, the region that would encompass Florida sports betting is thriving.
A bunch of other states near and around The Sunshine State have joined the legal sports betting ranks in recent years. That has apparently led to a major year-over-year uptick in gambling revenue.
To close out July 2023, the National Indian Gaming Commission announced the profits from the region for the fiscal year 2022. Their revenue stream was, predictably, in the billions. But it was almost in the double-digit billions, a figure that shocked even the rosiest projections.
How does the gambling revenue generated throughout the region impact the future of Florida sports betting, if at all? That’s exactly what we are here to figure out.
H2: The Florida Sports Betting Region Remains on a Meteoric Rise
The National Indian Gaming Commission delivered the latest news via a press release attributed to Chairman E. Sequoyah Simermeyer and Vice Chair Jeannie Hovland. See the full details from their joint statement below:
“Today the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) released Fiscal Year 2022 (FY 2022) Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) numbers totaling $40.9 billion, an increase of 4.9 percent over FY 2021.Gaming Revenue for FY 2022 is the highest in Indian gaming history. Seven of the National Indian Gaming Commission’s eight regions showed an increase over FY 2021. The overall FY 2022 GGR increase was $1.9 billion, about 5 percent higher than the historic FY 2021 GGR of $39 billion, as operations emerged from the pandemic.”
It should be noted that these figures are for every region of the National Indian Gaming Commission. We needed to dig a little deeper to look at what would be the Florida sports betting region.
That section of the country is referred to as the “D.C.” region. It encompasses the revenue earned from overall gambling and sports betting in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina and New York, in addition to Florida. This region generated $9 billion of gross gaming revenue for the fiscal year 2022.
To be sure, this is actual revenue—the money made after the National Indian Gaming Commission accounted for all winning bets they needed to pay out. It does not, however, reflect the money they made after taxes.
How Did the Florida Gaming Region Fare So Well without Sports Betting in The Sunshine State?
Hitting $9 billion in gross gaming revenue is impressive for obvious reasons. It represents roughly a 10 percent increase over what the region generated in 2021 ($8.1 billion). This raises the question: How did this grouping fare so well without Florida itself, which is considered no worse than the third or fourth largest sports betting market in the United States?
For starters, it’s important to remember these numbers take into account all gaming revenue. This means that Florida casinos are factored into the equation. And those remain destinations for residents in The Sunshine State.
Mostly, though, the D.C. region owes a huge part of its uptick to the legalization of sports betting in New York.
Operations in The Empire State went live in January 2022, right at the beginning of the fiscal year. In that time, New York generated approximately $1.4 billion in gross gaming revenue from sports betting alone.
Granted, that number represents bets placed with some of the best online sportsbooks in the United States. The National Indian Gaming Association isn’t tied to all of them. Still, the debut of sports betting in New York went a long way toward ensuring a region that is light on legal sports gambling in its other states was able to significantly increase their earnings.
Will These Gross Gaming Revenue Reports Impact the Future of Florida Sports Betting?
Florida sports betting enthusiasts won’t want to read this, but it’s unlikely the 2022 gross gaming revenue reported by the National Indian Gaming Commission will have a material impact on the future of gambling in The Sunshine State.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nor is it to say the numbers will have zero effect. If nothing else, these reports reinforce that legal gambling in the United States remains in high demand. Especially in the region that includes Florida.
Regardless, the Florida sports betting conversation has mostly graduated from needing data. The state knows Floridians want it. They’ve known for years. It’s why they attempted to legalize in-person wagering by agreeing to an exclusive gaming compact with the Seminole Tribe in the first place. The demand for Florida sports betting was never the issue. It was the manner in which it was rolled out. The state and Seminole tribe billed it as on-site gambling only. But then the Seminoles released a mobile sports betting app in Florida that could be accessed from almost anywhere in the state, arguing that their application was an extension of tribal property.
That logic didn’t hold up in the District Courts. Sports gambling in Florida was repealed almost as soon as it debuted. But the United States Court of Appeals recently ruled to overturn that repeal. As of June 2023, sports betting in Florida is technically legal again.
Whether the Seminole Tribe will relaunch their gambling services is a separate matter. As we’ve covered in this space before, many have speculated Florida sports betting could relaunch in time for the 2023 NFL and college football seasons. The Seminoles, however, have yet to confirm that timeline. This puts Florida in a weird lurch, where sports betting is legal but not active. The timeline for when that changes remains unknown. It stands to reason, though, we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on when football season kicks off in the coming weeks.
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