CLEVELAND — Sports bettors in Ohio are familiar with the process that goes along with placing a bet on their phone, as their location is checked to make sure they are in a state where sports betting is legal.
The company that provides those geolocation checks, GeoComply, is able to track how many of those occur in a given stadium. The company tells News 5 that an average of 6,064 sports bettors open their app in the stadium during a game, or roughly 9.3% of those in attendance.
It's an interesting snapshot into the industry that is coming off a record year in 2025, generating for the first time more than $1 billion in revenue after all bets were paid on more than $10 billion in wagers for the year. Numbers fueled mainly, industry analysts say, by the power of football.
"We see in September, October, November, December is often times double what we see in maybe a June, July, August. Football continues to be king across the country and especially in Ohio," said Ryan Butler, a senior news analyst with Covers.com who covers the sports betting industry.
"It's just funny, if the Browns or Bengals ever got their acts together we would see even more action in Ohio than we already do," he said.
While 2025 was record-breaking for the industry, it was also news-breaking with federal sports betting charges brought against people connected with the NBA, college basketball and of course, last summer's case involving two Guardians pitchers, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz. A probe that appears to be deepening with new allegations accusing Clase of throwing suspicious pitches to benefit bettors in at least 48 games over the course of two years.
All of this prompted Gov. Mike DeWine, who signed sports betting into law, to say recently that it is his biggest regret as governor.
"These just need to go away," DeWine said last October of the prop bets. "Maybe we can get all of the major sports to agree, all the different leagues to agree to abolish this nationwide and of course that's what we really need."
While the sportsbooks and Major League Baseball did put some guardrails on baseball prop bets, they still remain. Also, remember in Ohio, prop bets have always been limited to the play on the field, so in the Super Bowl, things like the outcome of the coin toss, how long the national anthem goes or what color Gatorade is thrown on the winning coach, you will not find.
Butler said because of DeWine's recent comments, it's unlikely Ohio would see any expansion of gambling, like iGaming, until after DeWine's term ends.
"About 30 governors have signed off on sports betting expansion bills in some capacity and none of them have come out with, just the lament, that Governor DeWine has come out with and because of that, because of the current political standing and everything with because he is going to veto and be a blockade to it just gambling has just frozen here in Ohio," Butler said.
