With the Alliance of American Football pulling the plug on its inaugural season, the FanDuel sportsbook won’t simply be refusing money wagered on futures bets for the league championship. They’ll be treating all of them as winning propositions.
FanDuel announced on Wednesday that it will regard the Orlando Apollos as the league champions, and that it will regard all straight futures bets on any of the eight teams as AAF champions.
“The AAF should be commended for trying to do something disruptive in the sports landscape, and we hope this symbolic gesture shows the players and coaches that sports fans everywhere appreciated the hard work and sacrifices they made for entertaining us with Spring Football,” FanDuel CMO Mike Raffensperger said in a statement. “While we’ve declared the Apollos honorary champions, we think the biggest winners should be our customers and hope they enjoy their payouts.”
And, presumably, that they’ll reinvest their payouts via other bets. Indeed, the kind of gambler who would roll the dice on a futures bet for the AAF championship when nothing was known about the league is precisely the kind of bet-on-anything customer to whom FanDuel should be catering.
