The timing of the suspensions was unfortunate. Or perhaps it was karmically inevitable.
Forty-two days after Major League Soccer announced a new partnership with Polymarket – a prediction platform that lets its users bet on just about anything, including whether, when, and where one country will bomb another – a press release went out. A pair of Ghanaian-born former MLS players, Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah, had been banned from the league for life for betting on games, including their own.
The Columbus Crew had declined Jones’s contract option on 26 November. Yeboah’s contract with LAFC had been mutually terminated on 16 January, whereupon he signed with Qingdao Hainiu in China.
(Qingdao, as it happens, was one of nine – nine! – Chinese Super League clubs that started the new season with a points deduction on account of match-fixing, bribery and corruption.)
MLS, the release said, had received “suspicious betting alerts through integrity partners” and hired a law firm to investigate. Jones and Yeboah had engaged in “extensive gambling on soccer, including on their own teams” during the 2024 and 2025 seasons, the inquest found. In one case, the league says the pair had bet on whether Jones would draw a yellow card during an 19 October 2024 game when they were both on the Crew. Jones did. The players were also found to have shared information on their manipulation of yellow cards with other bettors.
The investigation was triggered in October 2025, whereupon the players were immediately placed on administrative leave. Which is also to say that the league was entirely aware of its vulnerability to manipulation before it went public with Polymarket, with an ongoing case of suspected match-fixing to deal with.
At a minimum, MLS must have understood that the optics of revealing a new deal with a prediction market would be very poor.
It proceeded anyway.
“As MLS continues to grow, innovation remains central to how we engage fans and evolve the league,” Gary Stevenson, the league’s deputy commissioner said in the Polymarket announcement. “Partnering with Polymarket allows us to integrate prediction markets as a new fan engagement format and position MLS as an early leader among global soccer properties.”
A fan engagement format. Yes. Because the fan must always be hit up for money – sorry, engaged – in fresh and exciting ways.
Certainly, these suspensions and the agreement with Polymarket are not directly linked. But they exist on the same continuum. They are stops along the same road, originating at the sudden reversal in the sporting world from stonewalling any attempted incursions from the betting houses to the warm embrace of it. Yes, the 2018 US supreme court decision to strike down a law that banned states from legalizing sports betting opened the door, but the leagues getting into bed with the gambling business was still a choice. Evidently, enough time had passed to make all the corruption in early American professional sporting history fade from the memory. And there was all that money to be made.
That path has led an industry premised entirely on the appearance and protection of total integrity to a place of moral and logical ambiguity.
You can bet on our games, but the players won’t, we promise. Trust us. They shall remain above these earthly temptations that you, dear fan, should definitely indulge in. Our players shall be impeccable, unimpeachable. You, on the other hand, should probably bet the over.
Like most leagues, MLS could not resist the easy dollars on offer. It knows full well that creating another venue and suite of incentives to tinker with its games invites risk. After all, it took an entire year for Jones and Yeboah’s first documented match manipulation to metastasize into an actual investigation. And the league already had a warning shot – Sporting KC midfielder Felipe Hernández was suspended in 2021 for gambling offenses, allowed to return, then caught betting again in 2024, at which time his contract was terminated (Hernández’s actions were not found to have compromised the integrity of any MLS match).
The league ought to know that these sorts of agreements make it ever easier for its own players to be tempted. The gender and age of its workforce puts them squarely in the sweet spot for the very demographic the betting apps are designed to clinically target and exploit: young, overconfident men.
“Major League Soccer remains steadfast in its commitment to match integrity,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said in a statement upon the announcement of the suspensions. “The league will continue to enforce its policies, enhance education efforts, and advocate for the elimination of yellow card wagering in all states to protect the integrity of our competition for clubs, players, and fans.”
The trouble is that, plainly, the enforcement of policies does nothing to restore the faith that crumbles a little further every time a game is affixed with a question mark. And that enhancing education accomplishes little, when it is plain to see that for all the efforts to encourage “responsible gaming”, in the parlance of the betting industry, the many societal harms caused by legal sports gambling continue to grow.
The way to wage war on match manipulation, meanwhile, isn’t to combat the ability to bet on yellow cards – that’s just a symptom of the disease; the match-fixers will just move on to something else – but to discourage betting in its entirety.
With its credibility swaying in the wake of a betting scandal, the very last thing MLS needed was to be publicly in business with a prediction platform. The statements about protecting integrity ring hollow. They are akin to preaching fire safety while, at the same time, handing a can of fuel to the arsonist who has just set fire to your shed.
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Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
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