Raising the Stakes

“I want people to understand, gambling is not a bad thing if you do it within the framework of what it's meant to be, which is fun and entertaining.” Michael Jordan?

“So the gambler, lest he should lose, does not stop losing.” Ovid?

Last year, I wrote an article about sports betting , focused primarily on how technology enables and encourages gambling by making it private, easy, and accessible 24/7. This ease also makes it possible to bet, from any place in the world, during the games and on any aspect, not just the outcome. Young people love this. We now have two generations (plus) that have grown up saturated with the ubiquity of the online world, phones permanently attached to one appendage or another.?

There are signs of alarm that should have greater visibility in our society, and I took the liberty of proposing some ways of dealing with current and future ramifications of sports gambling. But it’s an uphill battle. Easy money has always held a seductive allure.?

Estimates about the total amount of money that changes hands during March Madness varies depending on what’s included in the estimate and the source of the information. The rough consensus hovers somewhere around $10 billion. That’s only the NCAA Tournament, not a total of all sports betting. This is an aggressive estimate, but the one most commonly cited around tournament season.?

Sports betting in total, is a $150 billion industry; this is considered a conservative estimate.?

The Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, allowing states to legalize sports gambling. As a result, the sports-betting market has been authorized in 30 states , and gambling ads saturate the media. Sports-betting revenues grew 69 percent from 2019 to 2020 and another 270 percent during the first quarter of 2021.The American Gaming Association (AGA) proudly announced that the U.S. commercial gaming revenue reached a record $52.99 billion in 2021.?

The glass half full perspective is the chief benefit: lots of money to be made, for governments and businesses alike, as well as the gambler with good fortune. Gambling activity is shifting from illegal operations to legal, creating jobs and reducing criminal activity in the betting industry. State and local governments, hurting from the economic fallout their COVID -19 policies created, stand to benefit from increased tax revenue from legal gambling — $861 million in gambling taxes since 2018 — money that is deeply seductive to those that know what to do with your money better than you. States legalize, monopolize, and monetize.?

The opposite position is that gambling produces corruption the way water finds its own level; you can try to suppress it, control it, redirect it for a while, but eventually, it wins. We can visit pre-2018 examples: the opening of Asian online gambling in the 2000s, spawned repeated scandals, primarily in the world’s most popular sport: soccer. Italian and South African soccer have been particularly corrupt. Another fixing scandal will contaminate American sports eventually; it’s only a matter of water finding its level.?

A more direct cost is that many unlucky and vulnerable people are destroyed.?

None-of-the-above include the basic economic consideration of how resources ($$$) are allocated, and the opportunity costs of those resources. In the first three years of widespread legalized betting , both online and at casinos, people have gambled almost $87 billion — that’s billion! Where did the $87 billion come from, and what was it not spent on?? Money used for one thing — say, gambling — means money not spent on something else — groceries, gas, health care, rent, kids, and savings. The opportunity to place a bet curtails opportunity to spend on other things.?

Worse still, though betting losses are loosely tallied, pre-2017 estimates — before legalization — were that lottery players and gamblers lost $107 billion in just one year. The average debt of a male gambling addict is between $55,000 and $90,000.??

Opportunity cost indeed.?

The big three, baseball, football, and basketball, are hooked.The NFL , NBA , MLB , WNBA , and NHL (not to mention some college programs ) have all signed lucrative deals with sports books such as MGM, Bally’s, PointsBet, and DraftKings. They’re all counting on sports fans to become addicted as well and making every effort to seduce them. Professional sports organization’s intoxication with gambling and its wall-to-wall messaging on all platforms, including mobile, will suck an increasing number of kids into online betting.?

The future of money in sports is gambling. The tsunami of advertising—and the oceans of cash it generates—put the integrity of the games we love at risk. As a former athlete who is still a passionate sports fan, it makes me cringe to see something I love contaminated.?

This cannot end well.?