How Sports Became Addicted to Gambling

Here’s an experiment for you. Go onto YouTube, turn off your AdBlocker if you have one, and see how many adverts for gambling sites and apps you get over the course of the day. I swear that every ad I’ve gotten on the site for the past few months has been related to gambling (or Temu, but that’s a different story.) It’s not just online either. TV ads are an endless cycle of promotion for how to make a few quid or “enjoy your favourite sport even more” with gambling. Watch any match or game and it’s the same issue, whether it’s the pitch-side advertising or logos on the strips or players themselves doing the sponcon. When he’s not sucking up to Saudi dictators, Kevin Hart is shilling for gambling (consistent morals, I suppose.) No matter what I do or where I go, gambling has besieged one of the biggest and most profitable industries on this planet, and in the process, it’s made everything so much worse.

Gambling has existed for as long as humans have wanted to screw around and screw over others. But in recent years, the proliferation of legalized gambling has spread at an alarming rate on both sides of the pond. In America, it’s expanded well past the state lines of Nevada, and you can now place bets in various forms across the nation. Online gambling, in particular, is now legal in 17 states. In 2018, the United States Supreme Court declared a federal ban on sports gambling to be unconstitutional, and now, sports betting is legal in 38 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico. The American Gaming Association reported a 2023 handle of $121 billion and a revenue of $11 billion in commercial sportsbooks, which is a startling increase from only five years prior, where tens of millions fewer Americans waged on sports events of any and all kinds.

Pretty much every sport can be bet on, from college football to the major leagues to the Olympics. The impact has been corrosive in practically every way. Take the world of college sports, for example, a historic field of exploitation and abuse masquerading as an educational benefit. ESPN reported on a gambling ring that ‘travels around the nation, inviting athletes to parties where there’s gambling. The plan is to put the student-athletes in debt and compromise them for future exploitation.’ They also noted ‘anomalies’ during recent college basketball games and alleged point-shaving schemes tied to these gambling rings.

Corruption in sports exists without gambling, but with it, the problem is exponentially worse. ‘Illegal betting is the number one factor fuelling corruption in sports’, according to the UN in 2023. Many athletes in various sports have been banned for betting on their own games, such as Detroit Lions wide receiver Quintez Cephus and Washington Commanders defensive end Shaka Toney. Investigations into college and major league betting anomalies have increased drastically over the past couple of years. And this doesn’t even get into the wider issues of organized crime and the underworld powers that have continued to profit from legalized systems.

Now, we also have the stalking and harassment issues. In June of this year, Olympic sprinter Gabby Thomas was heckled at a race by a bettor who took to social media to brag about how he made her lose the race and won big as a result. Thomas detailed how this man followed her around the track and yelled personal insults at her. This man was eventually banned by the betting site FanDuel Sportsbook, which condemned his behaviour, but the central issue still stands. Heckling is a part of sports, but imagine if the crowd had a collective pool of millions of dollars bet on you losing, and they’re doing everything in their power to ruin your performance.

Imagine this happening to you when you’re a 19-year-old college student. As The Guardian wrote in 2024, gambling in college sports has ‘put a target’ on the backs of many athletes. Basketball coach Anthony Grant had to call it out at a press conference in January 2023 when his team of literal teenagers received a torrent of abuse from grown men who were mad that their bets hadn’t gone as planned.

Amid the much-discussed male loneliness epidemic is a sea of gambling exploitation that few people are confronting. This is a market that zeroes in on young men and even children (just check out how many online spaces for kids, like Roblox and Fortnite, are full of gamified elements that act like gambling mechanisms.) It sells betting as macho, glamorous, and part of a “high quality” life. The actual consequences are far darker. We’re now left with a whole new generation of covert gambling addicts, largely men who are targeted by these adverts that sell the endless dumping of your hard-earned money as a communal activity or way to “get even” with the elites. In England, gambling clinics tied to the NHS have experienced “a rise of 130% in referrals in a year.” We also know how much women suffer as a result of this. The statistics on how domestic violence rates rise after major sporting events are staggering.

The sports world was already a hive of problematic issues and politics, but gambling has made them all even more rotten: corruption, misogyny, athlete harassment, toxic fandoms, and much more. Turning this addictive pattern into a multi-billion-dollar industry where every sector of the sports world is complicit and profiting has poisoned the well, perhaps irrevocably. And none of them will speak out as long as there is money to be made: the managers will keep their cuts, the players will appear in the ads, the celebrities will yuk it up in glossy ads, and legislators will turn a blind eye to the havoc they have caused.

The argument you always hear from pro-gambling lobbyists is that making it legal keeps it safe and offers oversight for betters, sportspeople, and businesses alike. But gambling is an intrinsically addictive idea that cannot help but become corrupted, regardless of whether or not it’s an above-board system advertised in between episodes of NCIS. Making it legal hasn’t stopped players and coaches from trying to fix games, nor has it made things safer for those just trying to do their jobs. No amount of ‘just play safe’ PSAs uttered through gritted teeth can balance out the obsessive nature of the game, and it is a game. The only way to fix the system is with a total overhaul, but that would require the institutions in control to make the entire concept less addictive, which defeats the point. Legalized gambling has not sought to fix its errors. It’s just turned them into marketable qualities.