Sports betting is out of control
My college roommate was a bookie. Our sophomore year, he and another kid pooled a couple thousand dollars and took bets from our classmates using lines they pulled from ESPN.com. It was real “momand-pop-type stuff,” as my former roommate puts it now. Everybody knew everybody.
Only once was he ever stiffed by a customer. He knew that this client, whose dad worked at the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” ESPN itself, could pay. But time passed and he didn’t pursue it. My roommate did well for himself, and the book closed after graduation.
We still see each other regularly.
I mention that to make clear up front that I’m not morally opposed to gambling.
His operation was fairly modest. The business only grew by word of mouth. And bettors were limited — by the paltry wages of on-campus gigs, by what remained of their summer internship money, and by whatever allowance mom and dad were willing to front. And, after all, there was a ceiling to the risk my buddy and his partner, hardly barons themselves, were willing to take on, lest the whole shop go bust on one bad break. The vigilance of on-campus authorities meant that everything had to be done discreetly.
But if those same bettors were in college today, they’d have much greater freedom to wager money on sports — and they’d make a much bigger target for the bookies.
In 2018, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association struck down the 1992 congressional ban on sports betting championed by two-time NBA champion and then-US senator Bill Bradley.
What’s happened since then shouldn’t come as a surprise, because you’re living it.
Now legal in Massachusetts and 37 other states, sports betting has become deeply normalized. So has its ubiquity — unbidden odds, enticements, and celebrity-driven advertisements are plastered everywhere. And it’s not really a secret who these commercials are aimed at: men, mostly young and often suffering from an acute awareness of their own low status in society.
It’s normal for your 20s to be a period of painful growth, but these days, it seems that men are struggling more than usual. Falling rates of male post-secondary enrollment bear this out. Richard Reeves at the Brookings Institution has written a lot about how men, on average, have not responded well to changes in our economy: The outsourcing of heavy industry and increasing automation have eliminated much blue-collar work. And college-educated men, who may be finding the rat race less than it was cracked up to be, are hardly immune to feeling dead in the water. The near-term result is lots of directionless men with time and energy to spare.
Here’s where gambling comes in. And it gets its foot in the door by posing a very simple question: What if you could change your fortunes overnight?
“The truth is, you’ve won too much,” Vince Vaughn tells Tom Brady in a recent Super Bowl ad for BetMGM, before NHL legend Wayne Gretzky pops in, for good measure. “Let others have their turn.”
Similarly, a DraftKings spot featuring Kevin Hart that aired during the 2022 Super Bowl offers a guarantee: “The crown is yours.”
Neither commercial admits the possibility of failure.
Hold on a second, you might be thinking. Surely, bettors must know they’re taking a risk by definition? That’s the whole point, right? “The house always wins.”
True, except that to play in many cases is literally to win or at least not lose, because the first bets most users will place these days are genuinely risk-free promotional offers. There are also bonus bets, site credit giveaways, deposit matches, profit boosts, rewards programs, referral bonuses, and more. Every advertisement, by every company, makes such offers.
Why are the companies so generous? They consider the initial avalanche of free bets and boosted odds nothing more than what’s known as customer acquisition cost.
Inevitably, some players will take their free bets, pocket the money if they win, and quit on the spot. But many more will take their free bets and, no matter if they win or lose, find they’ve acquired the taste to play again. Then they’re off to the races.
Betting advertisements play expertly on the parts of ourselves that wish to be daring, spontaneous, and victorious. They remind me of nothing more than the 2021 cryptocurrency bonanza — also famously risk-free, until it wasn’t — and the wall-to-wall advertisements geared at getting you to dump your modest savings into $GORILLA.
“Fortune favors the brave,” declared Matt Damon in a much-maligned ad for Crypto.com, possibly intending to stir our dreams of Rome (for some reason) before speeding off in a flying saucer, or however it ends.
Anyway, if you bought crypto at that point you probably took a bath.
Gambling ads pull a lot of the same tricks. They traffic in grandeur and celebrity, and no one can dispute that they’re manipulative and expressly designed to be. It’s a little banal even to point it out, but they almost exclusively feature incredibly famous and good-looking men, mostly athletes and movie stars, who have reached the pinnacle of worldly success by having excelled at something that has nothing at all to do with wagering money on the outcome of sporting events.
The 2024 Super Bowl, both the first to be played in Las Vegas and the most-watched TV event in US history, featured only three betting ads — deliberately capped at that number by the NFL. This was clearly meant as a sop to the no-fun crowd, allowing the NFL to say “See? Gambling hasn’t taken over.”
It was also tacit recognition that gambling ads are bad or that the advertisements are beginning to annoy people and it’s desirable to have fewer of them. (Of course, the tens of millions of children watching at home were subjected to zero ads for, say, flavored nicotine or tobacco products.) Americans went ahead and wagered a record $23 billion on the outcome anyway.
Betting advertisements rely on a timeworn playbook, a simplistic and reassuring story that the world comprises thinkers and doers, losers and winners, and that the doers are the winners. With the advent of legal mobile betting, ubiquitous and never farther away than one’s fingertips, the opportunity to take large risks for dubious rewards has never been easier to come by.
As it is, men in their early 20s appear to be uniquely predisposed to taking big risks, prone to overestimating their odds of success and underestimating the costs of failure. Researchers have called it the “young male syndrome.”
Since the act of placing a bet has now become frictionless, those who are addicted need only the smallest nudge to get back in the game.
Calls to the New Jersey problem gambling helpline have nearly tripled since 2018, and the largest demographic happens to be men aged 25 to 34. Research suggests that it may take years for a problem gambler to seek treatment, which means many of those callers have had their habits for years.
Incidentally, the industry seeks men out when they are several years younger than 25 to 34. In 2022, The New York Times reported that sportsbooks have partnered with universities including Syracuse, Michigan State, and Louisiana State to invade email listservs and inundate students with betting enticements. True to form, the industry professes safety, but many of the students receiving these offers are underage.
The 2018 Supreme Court decision was made in a vacuum. Its effect has been to allow betting companies to do far more than merely bring little bookmaking operations like my college roommate’s into the light. Mobile sports betting and constant promotions have induced new demand, completely transforming many spectators’ relationship to sports.
One of the 38 states that have legalized sports betting in some form — Kansas — has even rolled out extensive subsidies for sportsbooks, at the industry’s behest. More states seem poised to legalize betting. It’s possible that the level of betting has yet to reach its peak.
Here’s how to restore some balance
It’s easy to look at the dramatic changes that have taken place since 2018 and to try to conjure up equally dramatic solutions, like a new federal betting ban along the lines of the 1992 law.
That’s extremely unlikely to happen — state governments are not eager to forgo the billions in annual gambling tax revenue they now receive. Lawmakers should, however, stop to consider that they’ve made a trade-off, that there are social costs attached and that they’re not negligible.
What we should instead aim for is a golden mean of targeted regulation, somewhere between clamping down entirely and letting it rip as we’re doing now.
For bettors who simply can’t help themselves, public health-minded lawmakers ought to add friction to the process. Jay Zagorsky at the Boston University Questrom School of Business suggests that players no longer be allowed to fund their betting accounts instantly over Venmo and other online payment services. Instead, they’d make deposits into the betting apps only with cash that they put up at a bank or a retail seller of lottery tickets. That would allow bettors to continue playing as long as they’re in the black, but if they bottom out, they’ll have to get off the dopamine roller coaster and engage in a brick-and-mortar transaction.
In the UK, “whistle-to-whistle” bans on betting ads during games have shown some encouraging results in reducing the number of children exposed to these enticements. And in Australia, a national self-exclusion register — which stops bettors from placing wagers and prohibits companies from enticing them — has seen 18,000 sign-ups in its first six months.
It’s past time to begin experimenting with approaches that have shown results elsewhere.
The betting industry has seen exponential growth since 2018, and because gambling addiction isn’t visible in the way that drug overdoses are, there will surely be some lag before we know the true scale of harm. It’s also possible that people can suffer financial ruin even without being addicted to gambling in the clinical sense.
Doing anything at all is superior to the current approach. If we can’t return to the way things were, then we can at least make it easier for problem gamblers to help themselves and give others the chance to avoid being pulled in.