What is being said about legalized betting potentially “screwing” top WWE talent

As previously noted, WWE is reportedly looking to legalize betting in the United States on wrestling matches. During Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer of F4WOnline.com discussed the cons if this idea became a reality…

“Imagine if you’re in creative, because creative can’t know these finishes. If creative knows the finishes it’s gonna get out. It’s got to literally be Levesque (Triple H) and Bruce Prichard and almost nobody else know the finishes. The agents can’t know the finishes, no-one can. Because if the agents know, they’re gonna tell their favorite wrestler to be buddies with him. I’m not saying it’s gonna get out, but they’re gonna know, and then they’re gonna be hit with a violation. Almost nobody can know these finishes, so now you’re on the writing team, and you have no idea of these finishes, so you can only write for a week, you can’t do long-term stories. I don’t know if the people who are wanting to do this to get in with DraftKings and get sponsorship money, while at the same time kind of like screwing up the booking aspect of wrestling, really understand wrestling. Just the vibes that I’ve gotten from people are just kinda like rolling their eyes, and just thinking it’s really… it’s not a good thing, but it still might happen.”

“It may be one of those changes, and maybe they feel that this will raise the price (of the company), because now there’s gambling and they can tell the people who they are selling it to that ‘we are going to have a big increase in popularity because gambling will now be allowed on these things’. And they may think that that’s the case. It’s uncharted water, it may make it more popular in some ways. But they can’t do predictable finishes all the time. Because if you do, it’d be too easy to beat the system and then the gambling people would not want to be involved. It screws the main event talent a lot because they’re not gonna know where they’re going, and it screws the booker because he’s gonna have to book in a logical manner and an illogical manner at certain points in time to keep from being predictable.” (quotes courtesy of WrestleTalk.com)