The Outlook for Minnesota Legal Sports Betting in 2023 Isn't Great

"A bill to legalize Minnesota sports betting could stall due to the basic question of who gets to run the sports betting operations—and reap the profits. The goal isn't to build new brick-and-mortar casinos but to get a license to 'partner with a mobile gambling platform, such as FanDuel, DraftKings, or Caesars, to get a slice of the revenue.

"[Minnesota ] Vikings Executive Vice President of Public Affairs Lester Bagley said it 'seems inevitable that Minnesota is going to pass sports betting this year or next and therefore we will be at the table to help shape legislation.' However, so will the ten tribes that eased further off their longstanding opposition in a statement last week. Sports betting has developed an air of inevitability, even for the strongest opponents. Others at the Capitol on both sides of the aisle expressed openness to legalizing sports betting. Minnesota state Rep. Pat Garofalo said that the 'biggest issue is who gets to offer mobile gambling on devices. Is it just the tribes, or do the teams and the tracks get to participate? The tribe wants exclusivity. That's the difficult issue to resolve.'"

This is a serious gap that Minnesota needs to close. Other states have repeatedly failed in their attempts to legalize sports because they haven't been able to establish alignment between tribal and retail sportsbooks. California wound up including two separate sports betting bills on their November ballot because of a similar disagreement—and both failed. 

Can Minnesota Tribes Find Common Ground with Retail Sportsbooks?

As many may point out, Minnesota legal sports betting doesn't need to achieve a happy medium. Some states have granted tribes exclusivity. Wisconsin, for example, only allows on-site betting at tribal casinos. Minnesota could go forward with a similar model and work on the legalization of online sports betting over the next few years.

But going that route doesn't seem to interest lawmakers. Many of Minnesota's legal sports betting supporters have cited the popularity of online wagering as the impetus for their advocacy. More than 75 percent of all legal bets in the United States were placed online last year. 

Officials throughout the House of Representatives and Senate have also harped on the revenue Minnesota is already losing to betting sites. People in the state are still placing wagers even though it's not technically legal because they have access. At this very moment, there are plenty of sites from our reviews of the top online sportsbooks that will allow Minnesotans to sign up for and service an account. Legalizing only on-site sports betting won't prevent them from continuing to explore similar online-gambling workarounds.

Assuming officials continue to insist on some form of online legal sports betting in Minnesota, the chances of a successful gambling proposal in 2023 will dwindle. Though the bulk of Minnesota's professional sports franchises and their prospective retail sportsbook partners have expressed a willingness to work with the tribes, that sentiment isn't presently being reciprocated by the tribes themselves. They view retail and out-of-state sportsbooks as an existential threat to their business model.

On the bright side, a smattering of solutions has been brought to the table. Some have pushed Minnesota to assess higher tax rates on online sportsbooks and funnel that additional money to tribal operations. Others have proposed mandatory partnerships between retail sportsbooks and tribal operations. A few have called for a limited number of retail sports betting licenses to be handed out, so tribal sportsbooks aren't up against an oversaturated market. Whether these ideas can bring sports betting past the goal line remains to be seen. But the current tenor of negotiations suggests they can't—and Minnesota will finish 2023 without having legalized sports betting.