If you happen to drop a kid off at college this fall, you may be surprised to encounter representatives from assorted sportsbooks handing out free branded swag to returning students. Then again, you may not be the least bit surprised: In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 decision that opened the door for states to legalize sports betting, even the most casual fan is aware of the growing ubiquity of sports betting messages. One recent study determined they now occupy about 21% of broadcast time.
Students love free stuff—who doesn’t?—but the baiting tactics being deployed by the gambling industry are straight out of the drug dealer’s playbook: the free taste. The plan has two parts. One involves funneling people to gambling apps that feature all the psychologically addictive gaming tricks that digital companies have been perfecting over the past couple decades. These are the stratagems that keep my own 12-year-old son and all of his pals glued to their phones.
The second part involves normalizing gambling as part of the sports experience through telecasts, where bet-friendly stats are presented like the smart, quant-advanced analytics that shaped the sabermetrics generation. Just as Bill James created a dividing line (largely generational) between fans who embraced “wins above replacement” and those who scratched their heads over the newfangled stats, sports betting is now separating those who understand a prop bet or a boost from those who still don’t fully grasp the implications of a point spread. A decade ago, fans used such stats to manage their fantasy sports teams; now they use them to put real money down on a cross-sport parlay.
Surprise, surprise: This plan has proven incredibly lucrative. The American Gaming Association estimates that legal sports betting is boosting the profits of the four major leagues by more than $4 billion a year. The sportsbook business is doing just fine, too, having grown from $920 million in revenue in 2019 to just under $11 billion in 2023.
To understand how the whole thing works, you have to understand the apps themselves. There are still a dozen states where gambling is not legal—including California, which is part of the reason why Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter found himself in hot water earlier this spring—but if you live in a pro-gambling state, you can download and start using a FanDuel or DraftKings or BetMGM app immediately. Most of these apps (it’s a rapidly growing list) come with an incentive: a “free” $100 loaded into your account (provided you’ve already ponied up by funding your account) or a free “no-risk” bet. This is a sort of gambling-without-really-gambling enticement that can give the illusion that there is no risk involved. It appeals directly to the addictive mind.
“We see this a lot with our clients,” says Meredith Ginley, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology at East Tennessee State who works directly with the Gambling Clinic, which focuses on providing treatment and aid for those with gambling addictions. “Maybe they haven’t gambled for a bit, and then they get the push notification: ‘Put such and such down and we’ll guarantee coverage for the first hundred dollars.’ They see that as like, ‘Oh, they’re giving me a hundred dollars.’ And that’s particularly difficult for clients to resist. That’s enticing for everyone. Even people who are not into gambling.”
And those are just the incentives to get you to download. Once you’re in the app, whichever app you use, the design is specifically constructed to keep you there. Bet365 gives you a “first bet safety net” if your first bet loses, though only once, of course. DraftKings gives one “no sweat” bet.
“It begins to no longer feel real,” Ginley says. “It’s not money you’re putting in, it’s ‘points’ or ‘credits.’” The apps also allow around-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 hooked, even on sports they know nothing about. “There’s an accessibility that can be disorienting and dangerous,” she says.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, more than $360 billion has been wagered in legal U.S. markets. During that same period, problem-
gambling hotlines have seen a significant spike in calls: Volume at one New Jersey helpline nearly tripled in four years. A body of emerging research suggests teens and young adults are especially vulnerable. A 2013 meta-analysis from the State University of New York at Buffalo estimated that 10% of college students (five times the rate for the general U.S. adult population) probably have a “gambling disorder,” the term used to describe betting addiction in the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
“There’s a whole new generation of clients,” Ginley says. “Not many college kids were into slot machines. But they’re into this.”
And if broadcasters weren’t aware of this problem, they wouldn’t be running frequent PSAs about problem gambling. Which brings us to the second part of the plan. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to watch an actual sporting event without feeling you’re being left out if you’re not making a bet.
I inherited my love of sports from my father, whose passion for the St. Louis Cardinals and Fighting Illini offered a blissful—and harmless—escape from worries about the world: his job, his mortgage, his bank account. Now, as a father myself, I’ve tried to pass the same lesson along to my son. No matter what’s going on in the world, you can turn on a game and forget about it for a couple of hours.
But in the past few years, this has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, because the broadcasts themselves are relentlessly trying to get us all to gamble. They are reprogramming how we watch sports—by design. Worst of all, the broadcasts are reprogramming the way our kids watch.
The ads are incessant, integrated throughout the broadcasts. If you were watching the NBA playoffs on TNT this spring, you’d have noticed it seemed like every time a player stepped to the free throw line, a video would pop up, featuring some member of the Inside the NBA team letting you know that you should download FanDuel. (Charles Barkley has a multiyear deal—terms undisclosed—as a “brand ambassador” for FanDuel. He has also spoken recently about his struggles with gambling.) ESPN has also been heavily promoting its own ESPN Bet app during telecasts.
It’s jarring how quickly the landscape has shifted. For nearly a century, following the infamous Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series, gambling was the third rail of American sports. Leagues tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Athletes were forbidden from having anything to do with it. Broadcasters almost never dared mention it (though some—Brent Musburger, Al Michaels—would cheekily try to sneak in references to point spreads). Now broadcasts treat gambling odds as merely another set of advanced statistics.
During a recent NBA playoff game, TNT announcer Kevin Harlan noted that the live point spread had moved two points in the Knicks’ favor since the opening tip-off. In the past, broadcasters were there to keep us excited about the game we were watching, to contextualize and to entice, maybe provide some historical context if we were witnessing a record-breaking performance. Now we basically have them telling us, “Great matchup, huh? Well, you know what would make it more interesting? Having a little skin in the game.”
Emerging leagues are leaning into gambling to popularize their product. Paul Rabil, cofounder of the Premier Lacrosse League, views the estimated 50 million sports bettors in the U.S. as potential fans of the PLL. “We see it as part of how we are trailblazing the future of professional sports,” says Rabil, who’s also the league’s president. PLL broadcasts remind fans they can make in-game prop bets, using odds from outside oddsmakers. Rabil views all of this information as “additive insights,” even if you’re not gambling. He views the league’s association with several popular betting apps as mainly promotional. “We see the sportsbooks more as market expansion than monetization,” he says. “We have a chance to convert a new bettor who might not know the sport into a lacrosse fan.”
Betting inducements are fully baked into broadcasts now. ESPN’s “Win Probability” graphic sits on the score box of every Sunday-night MLB game it airs, adjusting with every pitch to update the likelihood that either team will win. This doesn’t provide any actual information to fans. There’s a great way to display how a game is progressing; it’s called “the score”—but it is catnip to gamblers, who can put new bets or hedge their current ones based on that ever-shifting number. Apple TV+, with its Friday-night MLB broadcasts, has taken this even further, expanding the probability that any given pitch will result in a strikeout, a base hit, or a foul ball.
These are in many ways nods to the sabermetric age, even if analytics experts pooh-pooh their predictive value. These broadcast stats seem to exist solely to tweak that addictive button in your brain—bet now. In an age when you can bet in real time on these live-game variables via the phone in your hands, the implication is crystal clear: These numbers are just as important as the ones that tell you who is winning. Maybe more so—because these numbers can put dollars in your wallet.
It’s worth asking what sort of future we’re ushering in as these technologies go mainstream. Former Cleveland Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff said after a game this year that he has been threatened by gamblers. Just this spring, the NBA banned Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter and MLB banned San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano, both for life, following betting scandals. We’d be naive to think these are isolated incidents; inevitably, more will follow.
But the largest question may be the culture that all this creates, a world where sports itself, the wonder of athletic competition and the communal aspect of shared fandom, is commodified in a way that threatens to replace much of what we have always valued about sports. It also, of course, threatens to create legions of new gambling addicts.
Recently, when I woke up my 12-year-old son the morning after a thrilling playoff win by our beloved New York Knicks, I couldn’t wait to tell him about how the game ended. After I gave him the particulars of Jalen Brunson’s heroics, he asked me the final score. I told him, and he said, “Wow, they even beat the spread.”