Sports gambling's generation gap
Top-line thoughts from the Siena-St. Bonaventure sports fanship survey
A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak to a class at a nearby college about sports media.
All but one of the questions the students asked me were about sports gambling. The professor who invited me was surprised. But honestly, I wasn’t. No topic I’ve written, talked, or taught about generates more interest than legal and accessible sports gambling.
The final part of American Sports Fanship Survey - a joint project of the Siena College Research Institute and St Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication - dealt exclusively with sports gambling.1 You can read the full release and see the main headlines here, and you can explore the crosstabs here.
What follows is what stood out to me as I looked at the results.
Last month, I wrote about how it felt to me like the vibes around legal and accessible sports gambling had changed in the past year. The data from the survey, though, do not bear this out. A majority of respondents — exactly 50 percent — believe that sports gambling should be legal in all 50 states, while 34 percent disagree with that statement. For all practice purposes, it held steady from our survey last year.2
Which means there is a gap between the vibes and the data.
Which means there’s a potentially interesting story here.
There is a very stark generation gap in attitudes toward sports gambling.
The findings are broken down by four age groups: 18-34, 35-49, 50-64, and 65-and up. On virtually every question that relates to attitudes about sports gambling, there is a noticeable split between people under 50 and over 50.
Start with the main question — do you think sports gambling should be legal in all 50 states? Young people think so — 59 percent of respondents ages 18-34 said yes, and 61 percent ages 35-49 said yes.
That number drops to 42 percent for respondents between the ages of 50-64, and down to 33 percent ages 65-and-up.
To put a fine point on it:
A clear majority of respondents under the age of 50 believe that online sports gambling should be legal, while less than half over the age of 50 think it should.
You see this over and over again in the answers. The rest, I’ll present in table format:
I think that last one holds the potential key to explaining this generation gap. Older sports fans grew up in a world where gambling was not just illegal, it was perceived as shady. It was the mob’s home turf. It was the source of scandals, of throwing games, of the Black Sox and CCNY and Pete Rose. Younger fans have grown up online, in a world where fantasy football is not just played but openly written about and where gambling is more common and more accessible.
All of that is just a hypothesis, but I think it’s a good place to start.
One other thing jumped out at me looking at the data. One of the headline findings was that about half of people who gamble online have chased a bet, meaning they try to make up for a loss by betting again to rebound. That feels like an important tipping point type moment for policy makers to look at it. To my untrained eyes, that looks like the moment where gambling can go from “extra thing I do to make some extra money and make the games fun to watch” to “Oh … oh shoot …”
Related to that, the survey found that 75 percent of people who had accounts with online sports books signed up because of promotions and so-called “free money.” So like how Fanduel, right now, has a promotion where you start an account, deposit at least $5 and if you win a bet you get $150 in something called bonus bets.
That’s clearly working as a way to get people into the tent. But combine that with the idea of people chasing bets, and you can already see the potential slippery slope that could lead some people down not-great paths.
I’m interested to know what y’all think. Again, here are the crosstabs. What stands out to you here?
Full disclosure: I’ve worked on this project for the past three years and help create, write, and edit the questions that are sent. This post is independent of that work, and no one at Siena or St. Bonaventure has seen this before I posted it. Not that it really matters - I’m not like giving away state secrets here or anything.
That’s up a percentage point from last year, which is within the margin of error so statistically and practically it held steady.
It's not apples to apples but it reminds me of a podcast I recently listened to where they talked about how many teenagers don't see any moral or ethical dilemmas with AI usage when it comes to creative outputs, compared to older people who see it as an ethical nightmare. As you mentioned, without the baseline history of seeing these kinds of things as harmful/bad, they just see it as a very normal thing to do.
Issues with sports gambling, including gamblers contacting players via social media, will be the biggest issue in sports over the next 20 years that won't nearly be reported as much as it should.