America's Betting Craze Has Spread to Its News Networks

I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.

When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.

We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way

I worked in the industry over a decade ago and it was nasty already. Know a few people who managed to gamble away entire inheritances.

When (not if) stuff like Polymarket gets legal in Germany, it will get even worse.

https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/how-a-psychiatrist-...

Most was lost at DraftKings’ casino apps though, not their sports betting.

I don't dig into the details and obviously everyone is diffrent but I imagine not being able to avoid the constant bombardment when trying to quit isn't a good thing

Personally I don't mind that it's legal but I do think people should be able to choose to avoid it

It's an easy solution but it's easier to get a kid to eat vegetables than get gamblers to accept that gambling is actually bad.

I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing.

Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are.

If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth.

People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on.

(Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)

A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.

The commercials are a celebration of addiction, and its disgusting to those of us who have struggled with addiction and know, like you say, the damage is clear. And they tacitly admit it too at the end of the commercial where they hurridly say "struggling with gambling addiction? call this number." As if that absolves anything.

And it's not just the gambling either. A typical commercial break these days consists of: gambling ads where they try to get you addicted, crypto ads where they try to bilk you, political ads where they lie to you, and then there's the omnipresent pharmaceutical ads. Every one of those ad categories should be made illegal, like tobacco advertising.

I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.

The institutions that enable gambling receive the majority of the upside, while society receives all the negative externalities of people not being able to pay their bills, digging themselves into holes, not able to participate in the real economy.

The institutions enabling this use dark patterns and addictiveness to fuel a cycle of dependence.

I am also of the libertarian ideology that we should mostly let people do whatever they want so long as it doesn't hurt others. But lately I've been starting to think there are some habits (gambling) and some drugs (fentanyl) that are impossible to use responsibility and that destroy individuals and degrade society.

I think gambling should be regulated and taxed. This should not be such a lucrative or desirable industry to target.

At least gambling in the stock market, housing market, etc. is actually tied to real securities and derivatives. Betting on sports is useless.

There are many places where gambling has been fully legal for decades. We should be able to look at data to make conclusions about whether something is good or bad.

(I do, however, wish people would shine a spotlight on scratch off tickets... mainly because the odds are so terrible compared to how they're advertised -- if it weren't state-sponsored, I don't think private companies would be able to get away with running ads for lottery tickets that pay out so incredibly poorly)

“Except in Nebraska!” (Sorry I mean Pokerstars New Jersey.)

At least if the sponsor is a truck company, they're selling me a truck for money. Maybe I don't need a truck, but I give them money and I get a truck that I might get utility out of.

Gambling is purely to separate chumps from their money, as much as possible, and then we as a society have to deal with that shit.

Some sports star selling me shoes, whatever. Gambling? It's more like "hey dumb asses..."

> A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.

Its generally the case that people didn't ask for it, most of the legalization of gambling in 21st century America was done by state legislatures, not referendums, and there's plenty of evidence that lobbying had a big role in this. However its also true that the public failed to reject it, most of the times it was put to referendum. Most people probably never asked for it, but when they were themselves asked most people took a libertarian position and said let people do as they want, even if it harms their kids by ruining their family finances...

I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.

Also, severe penalties for providers. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is probably dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.

The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.

Allegedly, per the indictment:

> Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.

IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians.

Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...

And of course, they ignore all the major sports sponsorships from these companies, which would otherwise make it impossible to air the most popular sporting events in the state now.

Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.