The tricky strategy behind the growth of addictive sports betting
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If you happen to be dropping off a kid at college this fall, you might be surprised to encounter representatives from various sports publications offering free branded swag to returning students. Then again, you might not be surprised at all: After a landmark 2018 US Supreme Court decision that opened the door for states to legalize sports betting, even the casual fan is aware of the rise of sports betting messages. A recent study determined that they now take up about 21% of broadcast time.
Students love freebies—who doesn’t?—but the lure tactics used by the gambling industry are straight out of the drug dealer’s playbook: the taste of freebies. The program has two parts. One involves connecting people to gambling apps that feature all the addictive gaming tricks that digital companies have been mastering for the past few decades. These are the tricks that keep my 12-year-old son and all his friends glued to their phones.
The second part involves traditional gambling as part of the sports experience via streaming, where betting statistics are presented as intelligent, highly advanced analysis that has shaped the generation of sabermetrics. As Bill James created a dividing line (mostly productive) between fans who accepted “success over turnover” and those who scratched their heads at new statistics, sports betting now divides those who understand prop bets or promotions from those who do not fully understand the effects of point spreads. Ten years ago, fans used such statistics to manage their amazing sports teams; now they use them to put real money down on cross-sport parlay.
Surprise, surprise: This program has proven to be incredibly profitable. The American Gaming Association estimates that legal sports betting increases the profits of the four major leagues by more than four billion dollars annually. The sportsbook business is doing well, too, having grown from $920 million in revenue in 2019 to just under $11 billion in 2023.
To understand how everything works, you have to understand the applications themselves. There are still a dozen states where gambling is illegal—including California, which is part of the reason why Dodgers star shortstop Shohei Ohtani found himself in hot water earlier this spring—but if you live in a pro-gambling state, you can download it. and start using FanDuel or DraftKings or the BetMGM app right away. Many of these apps (a rapidly growing list) come with an incentive: a “free” $100 loaded into your account (as long as you have already loaded your account with funds) or a “risk-free” free bet. This is a type of gambling-without-really-alluring gambling that can give the illusion that there is no risk involved. It appeals directly to the addictive mind.
“We see this a lot in our clients,” said Meredith Ginley, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology at East Tennessee State who works directly with the Gambling Clinic, which specializes in providing treatment and support for those with gambling addictions. “Maybe they’ve never gambled at all, and then they get a notice saying: ‘Put this down and we’ll guarantee a payout on the first hundred dollars.’ They see that as, ‘Oh, they gave me a hundred dollars.’ And that’s especially hard for clients to resist. That attracts everyone. Even people who don’t like to gamble.”
And those are just the motivations to get you to download. When you’re in an app, whatever app you’re using, the design is specifically designed to keep you there. Bet365 offers you a “first bet safety net” if your first bet loses, albeit only once, of course. DraftKings offers one a “no sweat” bet.
“It’s starting to feel unreal,” Ginley said. “It’s not money you deposit, it’s ‘points’ or ‘credits.'” The apps also allow round-the-clock betting. When Ginley’s clients discover they can use their apps to bet not only on baseball but also on cricket in Iran or handball in Switzerland—at all hours of the day and night—they can get involved, even in sports they know nothing about. “There is accessibility that can be disruptive and dangerous,” he says.
Since the Supreme Court decision of 2018, more than 360 billion has been bet in the US markets. Meanwhile, the problem-
Gambling hotlines have seen a huge increase in calls: New Jersey’s hotline volume has nearly tripled in four years. An emerging body of research suggests that adolescents and young adults are particularly vulnerable. A 2013 meta-analysis from the State University of New York at Buffalo estimated that 10% of college students (five times the number of US adults) may have a “gambling problem,” the term used to describe the addiction to gambling in the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
“There’s a new generation of customers,” Ginley said. “There weren’t many college kids who got into a slot machine. But they got into this.”
And if broadcasters weren’t aware of the problem, they wouldn’t be running so many PSAs about problem gambling. Which brings us to the second part of the show. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to watch a real sporting event without feeling like you’re being left out if you don’t bet.
I got my love for sports from my father, his love for St. Louis Cardinals and Fighting Illini provided a fun—and safe—way from worrying about the world: his job, his mortgage, his bank account. Now, as a father myself, I have tried to pass on the same lesson to my son. No matter what is going on in the world, you can open the game and forget about it for a few hours.
But in the last few years, this has become more difficult, if not impossible, because the radio stations themselves are constantly trying to get us all to gamble. They are reshaping the way we watch sports—by design. Worse, broadcasts are reprogrammed to the way our children watch them.
Ads are endless, integrated into every stream. If you were watching the NBA playoffs on TNT this spring, you would have noticed that every time a player stepped to the free throw line, a video would appear, featuring a certain member of the team. Inside the NBA team that informs you that you should download FanDuel. (Charles Barkley has a multi-year deal—terms undisclosed—as a FanDuel “brand ambassador.” He’s also spoken out recently about his struggles with gambling.) ESPN has also been heavily promoting its ESPN Bet program during the broadcast.
It’s amazing how quickly the landscape has changed. For almost a century, following the infamous Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series, gambling became the third line of American sports. The leagues tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Athletes were forbidden to have anything to do with it. Broadcasters almost never dare to say it (although some—Brent Musburger, Al Michaels—would try to sneak in a hint of the spread). Streams now treat betting odds as another set of advanced statistics.
During a recent NBA playoff game, TNT announcer Kevin Harlan noted that the live point spread had taken two points away from the Knicks since tipoff. In the past, broadcasters were there to keep us excited about the game we were watching, to set the context and interest, maybe even provide some historical context when we saw a record-breaking game. Now basically we have those who tell us, “Nice meeting, huh? Well, you know what would make it even more interesting? Having a little skin in the game.”
Emerging leagues depend on gambling to make their brand known. Paul Rabil, founder of the Premier Lacrosse League, sees an estimated 50 million sports bettors in the US as potential PLL fans. “We see it as part of the way we follow the future of professional sports,” said Rabil, who is also the president of the division. The PLL broadcast reminds fans that they can make in-game prop bets, using odds from outside oddsmakers. Rabil considers all of this information “additional information,” even if you don’t gamble. He considers the league’s association with several popular betting apps as advertising. “We see sports books more as a market expansion than a money maker,” he said. “We have an opportunity to convert a new bettor who may not know sports into a lacrosse fan.”
Promotional betting is fully baked into the stream now. ESPN’s “Win Probability” graphic sits on the scoreboard for every Sunday night MLB game that is played, adjusted around the clock to update the odds that either team will win. This does not provide real information to the fans. There is a good way to show how the game is progressing; it’s called a “score”—but it’s a game for gamblers, who can place new bets or place bets based on that ever-changing number. Apple TV+, with its Friday night MLB broadcasts, has taken this a step further, increasing the likelihood that any given pitch will result in a strikeout, base hit, or foul ball.
This in many ways acknowledges the age of sabermetrics, even if statisticians pooh-pooh their predictive value. These streaming stats seem to be there to tweak that addiction button in your brain—bet now. At a time when you can bet in real time on these live game variables using the phone in your hands, the meaning is clear: These numbers are just as important as the ones that tell you who is winning. Maybe even more—because these numbers can put dollars in your wallet.
It is worth asking what kind of future we are ushering into as this technology advances. Former Cleveland Cavaliers coach JB Bickerstaff said after this year’s game he was threatened by gamblers. Just this spring, the NBA banned Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter and the MLB banned San Diego Padres outfielder Tucupita Marcano, both for life, following betting scandals. We would be naive to think that these are isolated incidents; surely, more will follow.
But the biggest question may be the culture that all of this creates, a world where sport itself, the wonder of athletic competition and the social element of shared love, is being manipulated in a way that threatens to reclaim much of what we’ve always valued about sport. . And, of course, it threatens to create dozens of new gambling addicts.
Recently, when I woke up my 12-year-old son the morning after a thrilling play-off win by our beloved New York Knicks, I couldn’t wait to tell him how the game ended. After I gave him the details of Jalen Brunson’s heroics, he asked me the final score. I told him, and he said, “Wow, they even beat the spread.”
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