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Missouri’s top gaming regulator is optimistic the state’s sports-betting market will launch in time for the 2025 NFL season.
The Missouri Gaming Commission is tasked with regulating land-based and mobile sports betting in the state following the approval of a ballot initiative by the narrowest of margins during last week’s election.
Jan Zimmerman, chair of the commission, said that the regulator has been preparing for this moment for the last several years as state lawmakers have considered bills prior to 2024 that failed to cross the finish line.
“Those conversations had been taking place, and obviously became much more active conversations once the sports teams started looking at the initiative petition,” Zimmerman told Vixio GamblingCompliance in an interview.
The voter-approved constitutional amendment allows Missouri casinos and professional sports teams to offer wagering through land-based and online channels.
“There is some language in the initiative petition … that will be challenging because, since it is a constitutional amendment, we don't get to go in and tweak it or change things, so there are some things that we're working through,” Zimmerman said.
One of the biggest questions regarding the ballot measure was whether the language of the initiative would permit each casino to have its own sportsbook and accompanying mobile licensee, or whether each casino owner with multiple casino properties would instead be limited to a single skin.
“That was definitely, I don't want to call it a sticking point, but, there was a lot of conversation in that period of time leading up to the election, you know, with different entities being in opposition to the initiative petition because they thought the numbers of licenses were going to be limited,” Zimmerman told Vixio.
Among those entities was Caesars Entertainment, which invested more than $15m in an opposition campaign against the initiative.
“I think that that was a huge concern, and rightfully so. Those parent companies, if they owned a casino in Kansas City and a casino in St Louis, you know, how do we decide who gets the license and who doesn't?” Zimmerman said.
“It wasn’t an insurmountable problem, but it was just the wording of the initiative petition that caused some confusion.”
Zimmerman said the Missouri Gaming Commission will formally discuss sports betting for the first time during its scheduled meeting next month.
“We'll be having a conversation about the headway that folks are making that as far as the rules are concerned, but I don't look for anything to be presented to us for review and approval for several months,” she said.
“Those rules are very involved and and should be,” Zimmerman continued.
“When you're dealing with, and casino gaming is no different, millions of dollars, and the people who are handling millions of dollars and billions of dollars, you want to make sure that there's not a lot of holes in what you're doing.”
“I know I make people, the staff at the MGC, nervous when I start talking … but in my conversations with the new director and with other staff members, we are hoping, we are optimistically hoping that that we could have a launch date by mid to late summer.
“I will know more when I have that first conversation with the core team that’s working on the rules, and what kind of headway they’ve made and all that, but in my conversations with them, we’ve sort of targeted mid to late summer.”
FanDuel and DraftKings were the primary financial backers of the initiative campaign, contributing more than $41m combined in support of the sports-betting referendum.
Those contributions almost came to nothing, with just 50.07 percent of almost 3m Missouri voters ultimately electing to endorse the ballot measure.
“I mean, we only needed to win by a vote, so there's an argument that we wasted 6,099 votes,” quipped Peter Jackson, CEO of FanDuel parent company Flutter, on an earnings call earlier this week.
“But look, joking aside, we were very pleased it was passed. There was some reasonably strong opposition at one point to the amendment, so we were delighted to get it over the line.”
The constitutional amendment contains language that permits the MGC to issue two untethered mobile licenses to qualified applicants and outlines a list of criteria that many in the industry believe makes the two U.S. market leaders shoe-ins for those licenses.
That would enable operators to enter Missouri without having to link up with a land-based partner and pay market-access fees, a sentiment that Zimmerman acknowledged has been common.
“Those untethered licenses, they will go through the same process that everybody else goes through and our people are going to do their due diligence,” Zimmerman said.
