I know why sports leagues like gambling. Sports betting -- getting fans “skin in the game” -- creates deeper and more intense engagement with games, players and the sport. More loyalty.
More fandom.
I know why media companies like gambling. More fans with more skin in the game mean more viewers, more viewing, more time on apps. Plus, sports betting platforms spend billions of
dollars in advertising and sponsorship to reach sports fans and turn them into sports bettors.
Why the gambling industry likes sports betting is clear. It expands and “mainstreams”
its offerings into large groups of new customers. Millennia of learnings from human gambling have enabled gambling platforms to create stickiness like few other industries, driving high rate of
return play and maniacal loyalty, and accelerating spending habits of its largest and most loyal customers -- many certain that with “just one more bet” they can win back their growing
losses.
advertisement
advertisement
Like so many, I was disturbed by recent news of an alleged betting scandal involving the NBA and some top players and coaches “tanking” games. Like so many, I am not
surprised.
Corruption has always been part of gambling, and certainly in sports gambling, whether that gambling was legalized or not. Asymmetry of information has also always been part
of the game, and is as much a feature in sports gambling as it is a bug. And, with billions of dollars bet weekly, there will always be the ability to pay players, coaches and sports participants more
to divulge confidential information or to help alter the results of a bet than they could make just doing their day jobs.
To be clear, I am not an anti-gambling puritan. I actually ran a
college football betting sheet with a buddy briefly when I was a teenager in the ‘70s. We only lasted two weeks, barely fending off attempts to break our bank by more sophisticated classmates
who were running a competing pro football sheet. We finally succumbed to another classmate who, incredibly, won a payout of 50 to one by picking seven of seven games correctly against the spread,
draining our tiny, teenage bank accounts.
However, I think that we all should be asking some tough questions of ourselves: Is it really a good idea to turn our sports fans into sports bettors
too? Is growing gambling’s share of after-tax dollars of Americans a good thing for them, their families or our society?
And, while we’re at it, what about our young men? Many talk
about the challenges that young males face in America today: addicted to phones, absorbed in video games, falling behind academically, increasingly isolated. So many are sports fans. So many love
gaming. So many are competitive.
Are we ready to turn their time, attention and endorphins over to daily habits of gambling?
What do you think?
This post was previously
published in an earlier edition of Media Insider.