Sports gambling's vibe change

Is it just me, or are more people talking about this all being a mistake?

One of the interesting sports media stories of 2024 was the evolving coverage and attitude around legal and accessible sports gambling.

An interesting academic study would be to examine the valence of the stories about sports gambling in 2024 and compare them to previous years. I don’t have that data, so I’m working purely off vibes, which is a terrible way to conduct an academic study but works for my blog here.

And tell me if I’m wrong, but it feels like there’s been a vibe shift in how we collectively talk about legal and accessible sports gambling. It feels like it’s gone from sports gambling as “shiny new toy” to “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Again, this is one man’s read of the internet and the vibes.

Sports Gambling, as envisioned by the Substack AI generator. Too few robots.

To quote one of my favorite movies, let’s start with ridiculous and work backwards.

This comes from

Melissa Jacobs

and her essential newsletter, Good Game Kid. She links to an interview from Forbes, in which an executive with BetOnline (an unregulated online sports book) discusses his site’s placing betting lines on high school football and the Pop Warner Super Bowl.

The writer of the article starts with this:

Some people are going to say it's wrong to bet on High School and Pee Wee football because it's kids. Others may argue why it is okay because it brings attention and legitimacy to the events with more eyeballs on the games and leagues.

For real. He wrote this. Seriously.

The BetSports executive interviewed for this press release puff piece story said:

I will point to the Olympics as an example, which witnessed widespread wagering this year. There were 12- and 13-year-olds competing in the Summer Games and people could wager on those events. Same goes for professional soccer leagues on a global level. Allowing people to wager on youth football only puts more eyeballs on these leagues, teams and their incredibly talented athletes.

Pop Warner, a reminder, is for kids ages 5-14. There are no tryouts - every kid makes a team, and every kid is required to play. And high school is … high school.

BetSports is the same site that apparently allowed people to bet on the Special Olympics.

Look. If I have to explain to you why it’s messed up to allow gambling on the Special Olympics, you’re probably on the wrong part of the internet.

Even among legit sports books, it’s been a troubling year. The Athletic published stories on how college basketball players are getting harassed online for plays at the end of blowouts because they can impact bets people’ve made, how sports gambling can be quickly addictive for fans.

In November, David Hill wrote a deeply reported and fascinating look at the sports gambling industry for Rolling Stone and suggested that the industry bubble may be nearing a bursting point.

Hill’s reporting found that a majority of online sports bettors “gamble recreationally and responsibly, and therefore aren’t very profitable for the sportsbooks.” Sports books make money off high rollers and, Hill found, sports books are placing limits on how much those high-stakes gamblers can bet and win - forcing them to shadier gambling sites outside of the U.S.

Hill also reported that the state Colorado received only $6 million in revenue from its first year of leaglized gambling. New York, Hill reported, took in $2 billion. Hill also noted that “Penn Entertainment, which operates the ESPN Bet sportsbook after inking a 10-year, $2 billion deal with ESPN last year, has projected a $510 million loss this year in its mobile sportsbook division.”

The big picture from Hill:

Eye-popping endorsement deals and marketing budgets are being dramatically scaled back. State legislatures that once welcomed sportsbooks and their promises of tax-revenue windfalls with open arms have grown frustrated after those companies couldn’t deliver. After a cascade of 38 states adopted sports betting, voters and legislators in the states that have yet to come on board have pumped the brakes, with California, Georgia, and Texas all recently rejecting it. The tide appears to be receding.

Paul Krugman

, the Nobel Prize winning economist and former New York Times columnist, briefly discussed sports gambling on his Substack last week, including it in a discussion about about crypto currency and the stock market

But the main way in which policy has contributed to America’s gambling epidemic isn’t what policymakers did, but what they didn’t do. As technology made gambling and speculation essentially frictionless, fueling the rise of predatory “limbic capitalism,” policy did nothing to protect Americans from their self-destructive instincts.

This gets to a point I’ve made here before and will continue to make: The framing of this issue should be about gambling being legal and accessible, not just legal.

It’s a point

Zvi Mowshowitz

made on his Substack.

Vices and other distractions are constant temptations. When you carry a phone around with you, that temptation is ever present. Putting gambling in your pocket makes the temptation to gamble ever-present. Even for those who can resist it, that is a not so cheap mental tax to pay, and likely to result in the occasional impulse bet, even without the constant notifications. First hit’s free. Constant offers that adjust to your responses, to get you to keep coming back.”

The legalized mobile online sports betting experiment is a clear failure. It should end.

As we start 2025, I’m interested to see how this story and stories in this area are covered by sports media outlets. The individual scandals and stories get covered — and covered well in a lot of cases — but often they’ve been covered as one-offs, isolated incidents. I’m interested to see how the larger world of legal and accessible sports gambling writ large will be covered by sports media.

Given that The Athletic has a partnership with Bet MGM and ESPN has ESPNBet, I know how I lean.