Abstract
Introduction
Following the recent Supreme Court ruling to overturn the previous federal ban, the gradual legalization of sports betting across many jurisdictions in the United States will likely translate into a surge of new sports betting opportunities for the American public. Although betting on sports has long been engrained in the American gambling tradition, 1 the new legal status is likely to dilute large pockets of illegal sports wagering, which the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA), Adam Silver, has estimated at approximately $400 billion. 2 Furthermore, it is similarly likely that the rerouting of very large sums of money through legal channels will set up a favorable scenario for new business partnerships between sport leagues and bookmakers.
Over the past decade, Europe and Australia (among others) have already witnessed a similar proliferation of new legislation intended to tackle the increasing penetration of online gambling in everyday life. 3 Sports betting is viewed by the gaming industry as a major business opportunity, with continuous growth whereas most forms of gambling have stagnated, 4 but is also associated with sport integrity issues (i.e., match fixing, an issue often raised by professional and college leagues to stop the legalization of sports betting) and the psychosocial impact (e.g., problem gambling). In particular, sports-betting-related problem gambling—once a rare gambling preference for pathological gamblers undergoing treatment 5 —has gained attention since the number of patients seeking help for this specific problem appears to have increased. 6
Sports betting has many commonalities with other gambling types, but also features a number of significant dissimilarities. In this brief article, we provide evidence of three specific idiosyncrasies that are largely exclusive to sports betting products. These idiosyncrasies—namely, (1) in-play betting, (2) the sporting component of bets, and (3) the growth of media exposure to betting products—can be viewed as facilitating factors for problem gambling, and have guided some of the most recent research on the detrimental consequences of sports betting for consumers in Europe and Australia. 7 In the following sections, we outline the characteristics of each risk and detail the implications for problem gambling.
In-play Betting
In-play or live betting is currently the most popular form of sports betting in Europe, and in some countries, accounts for approximately 70% of money staked in bets. 8 In-play betting occurs when the gambler places a bet (or multiple bets) once the sport event has commenced. As opposed to bets placed before sporting events, as was historically the case in horseracing and football pools, in-play betting provides a direct link between betting and watching live sport, either on a small television screen, a jumbotron, or in the stadium itself. 9
There is a potentially detrimental side to in-play betting in terms of consumers' harm minimization. First, recent empirical research has shown that in-play betting is more associated than traditional betting with impulsive and/or problem gambling. 10 In-play betting entails instantaneous, instinctive betting judgments based on quick reactions to ongoing in-game stimuli. This specific type of betting is therefore more likely to be subject to cognitive biases and distortions. Available time in in-play betting contexts is reduced, therefore individuals are required to resort to cognitive shortcuts to make decisions. 11 This is particularly apparent in innovative features introduced by in-play betting such as “contextual betting,” 12 which is the kind of live bet opportunity that emerges when a specific game situation arises (e.g., betting on whether someone will score a two-point conversion in American football or score a goal in a soccer penalty shootout).
In-play betting has also changed the structural characteristics of sports betting from a type of betting that was typically discontinuous with a low event frequency (e.g., betting once a week on whether a team would win or lose) to a continuous form of gambling with high event frequencies in which dozens of bets (if not more) can take place within the length of a game, which can be two or more hours in games like soccer and tennis, to days at a time for sports such as cricket that can take up to five continuous days to complete. Research has consistently shown that types of gambling with high event frequencies have a greater association with problem gambling. 13 In-play bets are also generally associated with live game rituals. These rituals sometimes entail risky behaviors that in-play magnifies. For instance, in the UK and Spain, gambling commercials that depict individuals betting in-play are more likely to depict them drinking alcohol and eating junk food. 14 Such depictions normalize the identification between watching sports, and engaging in other potentially risky health behaviors, all in an atmosphere of instant decision making and impulsivity. This is further complicated by the transference of emotions from sport viewing to spectators, who are encouraged to bet in emotionally charged situations (sometimes involving the team they support) with limited decision time.
The “Sporting” Component
Another fundamental risk associated with sports betting is the sporting component itself. Sports wagering differs from other modes of gambling across a number of attributes. Some scholars have argued that the sporting component sanitizes gambling, stripping it from its more negative (“dark”) connotations. 15 Additionally, sport provides another dimension to gambling. As a betting type, sports betting proposes a game within an existing event that preexists the betting practice, and happens independently. In other words, sport competitions do not exist to be bet upon, betting always comes later. Conversely, gambling is created ad hoc, and the rules and parameters of gambling games only make sense within (and for) the act of gambling on them. This means that gamblers develop attachments to gambling, but bettors not only develop such attachments to betting, but also to that reality that preexists the betting itself (in this case, sports).
Sport is also a massive transcultural bearer of significance, identity, emotions, and belongingness. 16 The acquisition of such attributes is constantly sought after by other forms of gambling by decades of marketing strategies that have idealized gambling practices such as poker and casino gaming. However, sports betting operators do not need to construct anything ex nihilo (i.e., out of nothing). They simply need to jump on the bandwagon and build on the preexisting sports imagery. This imagery is replete with characteristics that might encourage sports fans to put themselves in harm's way in terms of irresponsible gambling. For example, bragging about one's knowledge of sports is part of the typical atmosphere in betting lifestyle. 17 Other examples include showing risk-seeking behavior, and engaging in unrealistic bets to prove to significant others an individual's ability to predict sport outcomes. These rituals and behaviors of sports communities are widely shared, cemented over long periods of time, transmitted between generations, and difficult to deactivate. 18 Consequently, one of the main battlegrounds in contemporary responsible gambling strategies when it comes to sports betting literacy is the deactivation of the idea that the relationship between sports and sports betting is natural, inherent, and inevitable. 19
A second component of the association between betting and sports is the predominance of sports in children's imagery. Minors feel pressure from friends to engage in risky behaviors, and normalize betting when they see others practice them, and perceive how normal and prevalent betting is in their community. 20 In sports betting, sport infuses many attributes, including health, fair play, justice, competitiveness, equal opportunity, improvement through hard work, and merit. 21 Sports betting benefits greatly from such attribute transference, thus validating the practice socially, and removing many negative connotations that betting, inasmuch a form of gambling, possesses.
The Growth of Media Exposure
The aforementioned risks are all likely to be fueled by the very large expansion of media exposure to sports betting products. If the U.S. follows suit of what has happened in European and Australian markets, the federal legalization of sports betting will provoke a race for legitimation of betting products. Such legitimation operates more subtly than mere legalization, and (according to “institutional theory” 22 ) adds two more pillars to it: (1) the normative pillar, which comprises the tolerance and acceptance by the American public of sports betting as a harmless product; and (2) the cultural-cognitive legitimacy pillar, which comprises the symbolic representations of sports betting and its de facto incorporation in American imagery. The successful fulfillment of this agenda is likely to result in the adoption of sports betting as a positively sanctioned recreational activity.
Media representations of sports betting are likely to become much more abundant than the current commercial spots populated by the fantasy gaming industry. In Europe and Australia, most legislation allows bookmakers to advertise before, during, and after sports events, even if such events occur before the watershed that protects minors from adult content. 23 Such proliferation has stirred up a social discomfort, reflected in numerous media reports that frequently cover testimonies of sports-betting-related harm. 24 Concomitant with the advent of online gambling, the money spent on television marketing and advertising has increased greatly in the UK in recent years. 25
Marketing and advertising claims of sports-betting-like products in the U.S. have been widely articulated through the skill versus chance axis (emphasizing skill components) to avoid breaking federal law. 26 This battle for conceptual framing now appears to have been rendered obsolete. However, skill components are likely to remain, even more so, at the core of marketing enticements. In Europe and Australia, bookmakers have been found to exaggerate the knowledge and skill-based aspects of sports betting, hence reducing the chance-based elements that determine game outcome, and consequently increasing the illusion of control in bettors. 27 It might be easy for these strategies to gain traction in the U.S. context, wherein fantasy gaming has already paved the way for a skill-focused understanding of gambling.
Final Remarks
In-play betting, sport, and media exposure are not independent attributes of contemporary sports gambling. Firmly based on the developments in remote gambling via smartphones and tablets, the three attributes constitute potentially interconnected threats that cross-fertilize the sports betting market and its neighboring industries. These attributes pose a great challenge for gambling policymakers, who are struggling to tackle properly the powerful intersection of sports and gambling in Europe and Australia. The lessons from these countries could help the U.S. to anticipate some of the areas that need examining and developing to grant consumer protection to vulnerable groups.