Betting on the Game, Losing the Soul
The explosion of sports betting threatens the very integrity of fandom.
You’ve seen the ads everywhere over the last few years.
A Draft Kings commercial flashes across your screen in what feels like every 10 minutes. BetMGM promises you big returns if you just download their app. FanDuel pop-ups invade your social media feeds. They all feature ads promising things like, “Get $300 in bonus bets when you sign up today!” to new users, promoting what seems like a certainty when Kevin Hart delivers the line as only he can.
This phenomenon is omnipresent, and has become so in only the last few years. Sports betting has seen an astronomical rise. But that’s probably not news to you.
But beyond the flashy ads and marketing schemes, sports betting creates deeper issues—ones that threaten to undermine fandom entirely. While the concept itself isn’t new, sports betting has moved beyond being just another way to burn cash at the casino; rather, it’s evolved into something broader, more sinister even, and has grown antithetical to the very core of what sports are about.
To understand the effect sports betting has had, we must first understand how we got to this point.
The sports betting scene as we know it today got its start when in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association that the previous statute on this matter, The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, was illegal, effectively legalizing sports gambling nationwide.
This decision opened the metaphorical flood gates. As of this year, 38 states and the District of Columbia now offer legal sports gambling, resulting in a record-setting $13 billion industry that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
What was once seen as shady and done through bookies under the table is now virtually everywhere. Sports fans can’t escape it even if they wanted to. Posters, billboards, commercials on TV and social media, even live odds on score bugs all ensure that even the most betting-averse fans can’t avoid it entirely.
The results of sports betting’s rapid acceptance have been varied and increasingly troubling.
Sports betting has now become an almost religious experience for many fans. Instead of attending or tuning into games for the enjoyment of the experience or to support their teams, many fans now watch sports as a way to compel their bets to pay off, even going so far as to following and heckling athletes who are competing at an event to achieve this goal.
A study conducted by St. Bonaventure University in 2024 found that 85% of online sport bettors believe gambling makes them more interested to watch sports. While increased viewership may seem like a good thing at face value, it reframes sports not as a source of joy and community, but as a venture for profits. Although this reality isn’t universal, its omniscient prevalence is alarming and should be understood as such by fans everywhere.
Another horrific consequence of sports betting’s ubiquity is the alarming trend of online harassment levied against athletes by losing bettors. Last month, Red Sox reliever Liam Hendricks revealed on his Instagram that both he and his family had received death threats online after one of his appearances.
Threats against Hendriks came just a few weeks after Houston Astros pitcher Lance McCullers received similar menacing from disgruntled bettors.
The ranks of professional sports aren’t alone in feeling the brunt of this disturbing phenomenon. In response to a tidal wave of abuse against its athletes, the NCAA has stepped up its public messaging regarding this increasing prevalence of online abuse in commercials such as this one that debuted in March of this year, in which it claims that “1 in 3 athletes have experienced betting-related harassment.”
These incidents are just the latest in a growing pattern of players becoming the targets of online hatred hurled their way after they, in the eyes of the affected bettors, impacted the outcome of a game that negatively affected their wagers. As outrageous as this sounds, it’s become routine for both professional and collegiate athletes alike.
This harassment has grown so widespread that it’s driving increased online abuse, in general. The NCAA found in a study published in 2024 that collegiate athletes receive 12% of all posted social media abuse. The study also concluded that “angry sports bettors drive as much as 45% of all abuse surrounding some major sports tournaments.” The more comfortable losing bettors become with berating athletes, some aged 18 or younger, the more outsized sports betting’s impact will become, feeding broader issues that it has helped exacerbate.
Among the most perverse consequences of our collective acceptance of sports betting at such a grand scale so quickly is its fetishization within sports culture. In the span of just a few short years, sports gambling not only has become legalized, but it’s also become encouraged, if not incentivized by a whole host of parties, mostly to the detriment of witting or sometimes unwitting bettors.
This enormous, multi-billion dollar industry is based almost entirely on the losses of bettors. And because anyone can now place a bet on a basketball game, lose said bet, and send slurs and death threats to an athlete anonymously all in the span of a few minutes thanks to sports gambling’s expanding presence on social media and smartphones, fans can become party to this industry overnight.
The rapid adoption of sports betting by virtually every major corporation in the country has had profound impacts on every facet of society, and with its rise has come a creeping outgrowth of its adverse effects that are quickly becoming outsized relative to its benefits.
But not everyone agrees with this perspective.
Many of sports betting’s proponents, including nearly half of all American men, cite its tax benefits as a reason it should be supported. While this may be true—tax revenue generated by sports betting jumped to $2.8 billion in 2024 from $2.1 billion in 2023, a 32% increase—the social cost must outweigh this financial boost.
A February 2025 study published by the JAMA Internal Medicine journal concluded that following the 2018 Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association decision, internet searches for gambling addiction help nationally skyrocketed by 61%. Between 2019-23, Virginia saw a 973% rise in the number of callers to its gambling addiction helpline. Florida noted a 138% increase in helpline outreach in the first two months after legalization, while New Jersey reported a 277% total increase since 2018.
With this spike in addiction has come an alarming trend of increased bankruptcy rates, some by as much as 25-30% just four years after betting’s legalization, according to a paper co-written in October 2024 by USC and UCLA professors. Recent research has also indicated that since betting became legal in 2018, domestic violence has risen by up to 10%.
Fans of sports betting also believe they have a right to participate, responsibly. While this is true, the consequences of decisions made by adults who, while free to make these choices, should know better are one thing, the naive mistakes of juveniles enabled by online sports books are another.
In 2023, the National Council on Problem Gambling concluded that as much as 80% of high schoolers gambled within the previous year, with nearly 15% of those respondents exhibiting signs of severe gambling addiction. As troubling as these statistics may be, they get worse.
A New Jersey study in 2021 found that more than half of all middle schoolers state-wide participated in some form of gambling activity from 2020-2021, 19% of which bet on sports. Another article by the Sports Business Research Network found that nearly 831,000 bettors, roughly 2.5% of the total betting population, were aged 13-17. These kids who take part in sports betting, no matter how small the bet, are four times as likely to develop a gambling problem later in life, potentially affecting the next generation of sports fans, exacerbating betting’s negative long-term consequences even more.
This post may seem like a worst-case scenario depiction. But consider this: when sports suddenly become more about hitting a 13-leg parlay than the struggles, storylines, and traditions that make them so consequential, then something is lost. The energy of a crowd during a big game, the passion of being part of something bigger than yourself, and the agony of defeat but promise of redemption are reduced to simple transactions that can have dark consequences.
If we continue to allow sports to redefine our fandom so profoundly, as we already have, then we risk losing the reasons why we became fans at all.