The Ghana international, Yaw Yeboah, is one of two players that have been banned for life by Major League Soccer (MLS) after betting on games – including those in which they were personally involved.
Yeboah and Derrick Jones have been kicked out of North America’s premier football competition for their ‘extensive’ gambling, while it’s also been claimed that the pair colluded to profit from Jones getting deliberately booked.
Jones had his contract with Columbus Crew torn up, while Yeboah has since moved from Los Angeles FC to Chinese side Qingdao Hainiu – it’s not yet known if he will be allowed to continue playing.
Cards for Cash
According to MLS officials, both Yeboah and Jones engaged in betting during the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
As well as wagering on the full-time results of numerous games in the competition, including those featuring their own teams, Jones headed a plot to get deliberately cautioned – from which he, Yeboah and other bettors profited.
In October 2024, Jones was booked in a game against New York Red Bulls for a reckless foul in the first half – a contest in which Yeboah was an unused substitute for Columbus Crew.
An investigation, conducted by an American law firm, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, on behalf of Major League Soccer, later revealed that both Jones and Yeboah had backed the midfielder to be cautioned amid a flurry of suspicious betting patterns.
“MLS also determined that the players likely shared confidential information with other bettors about their intent to draw yellow cards,” a league spokesperson commented.
However, their probe revealed that there was no evidence to suggest that either player had acted in a way that ‘affected the outcome of a match.’
Yeboah, capped four times by Ghana, had a four-year stint at Manchester City between 2014 and 2018, before embarking on a nomadic career that took in stints in France, Spain, Poland and finally the USA.
Jones, meanwhile, is an MLS stalwart, appearing more than 100 times for the likes of Columbus, Charlotte FC and Houston Dynamo, as well as representing the United States at youth level.
They’re not the first MLS players to be banned for gambling violations. In 2024, the Sporting Kansas City player Felipe Hernandez was found to have wagered on games for a second time, having first been suspended back in 2021 for similar breaches.
This time, Major League Soccer chiefs terminated his contract, with Hernandez since forced to play lower league football in the United States instead.
The commissioner of the MLS, Don Garber, has now called for a ban on yellow card betting in all states in order to preserve the integrity of the competition.
“Major League Soccer remains steadfast in its commitment to match integrity,” he said.
“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.”
Top of the Props
There are many in the United States who want ‘prop betting’, which allows punters to wager on individual players to achieve specific outcomes – like yellow cards, to be banned.
That has been the source of much controversy since sports betting was legalised at the federal level in 2018, with a host of scandals – including players deliberately underperforming – rocking both professional and college sports.
Jontay Porter, an NBA star, was banned from the competition for life in 2025 after it was found that he had deliberately been subbed off in order to satisfy the ‘unders’ side of his prop lines on points, rebounds etc… helping punters on the inside to a bumper payday.
The NFL Alumni group has called for prop betting to be banned on the grounds of ‘potential manipulation’, with low-paid players – especially those in college sports – vulnerable to nefarious schemes, which can often include cash-rich betting consortiums paying serious money to players to perform in a certain way.
And the NCAA, the top tier of college sport in America, has called for state governors to help them ‘eliminate threats to integrity’.
Kentucky and Minnesota are two of the states considering a ban on prop betting odds, with New York, Maryland, Louisiana and Ohio already outlawing the lines for college sports games.
Others, Illinois, Iowa and New Jersey have banned college sports prop bets in games involving teams from that particular state.
In the UK, prop betting lines are typically only available on the highest level of sport – the assumption being that elite athletes are less prone to such manipulation.