Jack Fisher's Official Publishing Blog

I love sports. I’ve loved sports since I was a kid. Some of my fondest memories involve watching baseball and football with my dad on a lazy afternoon. And I’ve gone out of my way on multiple occasions to belabor how much I love football.

Conversely, I’m not much of a gambler. Aside from buying an occasional lottery ticket and playing fantasy football, I don’t gamble. And when I do, I don’t consider it all that fun or thrilling. Given my frugal tendencies, I find gambling to be pretty stressful. Unless it’s money I don’t mind losing, I tend to avoid the experience.

So, as you might expect, I feel conflicted about how much gambling in sports has become so mainstream. It’s almost impossible to escape. Watch any game from any major sport and you’re likely to see some sort of ad related to gambling. We can groan and scoff at how ubiquitous they are. But let’s not ignore the bigger picture.

Gambling has always been part of sports. But until relatively recently, it operated mostly in the black market and alongside organized crime. You don’t have to go too far back to find major gambling scandals. It’s every bit as unavoidable as the ads we see today. Whenever high-stakes sports converges with large pools of money, there’s going to be gambling. It’s just a matter of how we, as a society, choose to manage it.

Now, I’m not going to go on a rant about the evils and dangers of gambling. Compared to other unsavory activities, it’s not fair to put it on the same level as drug addiction, human trafficking, or violent crime. But like any other vice, it can be very damaging to certain people.

If you have an addictive personality or are prone to taking unsafe risks, gambling can ruin you, your finances, and your relationships. Gambling on sports can further amplifies those risks because it draws out the experience. You don’t just pull a lever on a slot machine or scratch off a lottery ticket five seconds after you buy it. Once you place your bet, you now have a vested interest in a game. That interest lasts as long as the game plays out, be it a single baseball game or the entire NCAA tournament.

That’s akin to a steady drip of addictive drugs, rather than taking it all at once. And I strongly believe that’s a big reason why modern sports gambling has so much appeal. Unlike decades past, you don’t have to go to an illegal bookie or take a trip to Las Vegas to place a bet. You just need to take out your smartphone, load up one of numerous apps that’ll accept your bet, and wait for the results.

It’s easy.

It’s convenient.

It’s private.

And make no mistake. Every major sports league knows this. They’ve known for years that gambling is a lucrative, but dangerous business. They stayed away not because they opposed it on moral grounds. They did so because they understood that getting involved with gambling often meant getting involved with organized crime. That wasn’t just risky. It was potentially deadly.

And even if leagues thought they could handle them, there’s also the problem of players. Before leagues paid players millions of dollars, they understood that players would be tempted to fix games or manipulate outcomes in exchange for major payoffs. Beyond just undermining the integrity of the sport (which I doubt most leagues cared about in the first place), it made outcomes less about skill and more about who bribed who. And that just takes away from the spectacle that makes sports worth following.

Now, there’s no organized crime to worry about. Modern gambling companies are legitimate, multi-billion-dollar entities. Laws surrounding gambling have loosed over the years, so much so that the taboo surrounding gambling is almost non-existent. But that doesn’t make it less damaging to problem gamblers.

Being able to gamble on smartphones whenever and wherever they want just amplifies those problems. It’s also why a good chunk of gambling revenue comes from gambling addicts. But major sports leagues don’t care. They have no reason to care. They may make excuses, saying these people would find ways to gamble one way or another. At least the profits are going towards them and not mobsters.

But is that really better in the grand scheme of things? That’s an open question that I’m not prepared to answer.

I know it’s common to hear people claim that gambling is ruining sports. I understand that sentiment, but I also think it’s a gross oversimplification. It would be more accurate to say that it’s making sports, in general, a lot worse for the average fan.

You can already see it in the way major networks treat gambling as just another part of the game. Watch any broadcast that covers any sport and chances are they’ll sneak in some odds, be it potential starters for fantasy leagues or betting favorites for certain teams. It’s like an indirect signal that doesn’t necessarily encourage gambling. It just reminds people that it is an option. It’s also legal and easy, provided you utilize the official apps/sponsors.

And should you start placing bets on a game or season, then suddenly your experience changes a great deal. It’s now much harder to follow a game or team for pure enjoyment. Now, you watch anxiously, wondering if the bet you made is going to pay off. The thrill of seeing your team win is suddenly superseded by the thrill of winning money. And that’s a fundamentally different experience when it comes to sports.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I don’t deny that some people genuinely love gambling and it gives them exactly the thrill they’re seeking, even when mixed with sports. But a big part of what makes people passionate about a sport is how much they love the experience. It not unlike those sentimental moments I remember with me and my dad when I was a kid. That’s not something you can replace with in-game betting.

But if that’s someone’s only relationship to any sport, then are they really a fan? Or are they just a gambler looking for their next big win?