Sports betting has become an increasingly popular pastime, with millions of fans placing wagers on games and events every day. While some argue it adds excitement and a deeper connection to the sports we love, others like myself, raise concerns about its potential dangers, including addiction and its impact on the integrity of the game. As more states and countries begin to legalize sports betting, the debate over its pros and cons has never been more relevant.
Sports betting in the past few years has been shoved aggressively down our throats through Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx’s commercials and Eli Manning’s failed attempt at acting. You can no longer watch any sports game without seeing some form of celebrity endorsement for online sports books. As reported by ESPN, sports betting companies spent $434.4 million on national advertisement last year alone. Now, you may be thinking, isn’t this illegal? No, actually, because as of March 2025, 38 states have legalized sports betting.
Between 2018 and 2023, nearly $300 billion has been wagered on sports gambling markets, according to the Social Science Research Network. Gambling has been around for centuries, but sports gambling has grown through fantasy football, March Madness and even high school basketball games. When you look into sports betting, there is always an opportunity to place a bet, no matter the time of year. For example, table tennis is extremely prevalent in foreign countries, and most of those countries are hours ahead of us. You are able to place bets on table tennis at any hour of the day, and it’s actually the fourth most popular sport to bet on, behind professional basketball, football and baseball.
As funny as you might think that is, it comes with a darker side, as Business Insider reports that in states that have recently legalized sports betting, there has been a 28% increase in reported bankruptcies. Until 2018, sports betting was illegal in places outside of the casino, which changed when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to control their own sports betting laws across the country.
This opened the doors for extreme cases of sports betting. Many team owners were embracing these laws due to the fact that a way to get people to watch teams (even bad ones) is to allow fans to place bets on games. Even the current commissioner of the NBA, Adam Silver, encouraged it as it draws fans’ attention to the game when they have a bet placed. This also opened up opportunities for licensing deals. For example, the NFL made $130 million last year from gambling-related sponsorships as reported by the Washington Post. To put that into perspective, that is the equivalent of adding two NFL deals and their sponsorship revenues to the league. Some teams even have QR codes on the scoreboards to allow people to make instant bets on the next play.
When you look into betting itself, it has evolved drastically. In the past, you could only pick who would win, the score and which team would cover the spread. Now, you can pick a variety of different outcomes, including parlays. Parlays are a collective group of events that must happen in order for you to win big money. Parlays make up about 27% of the money wagered yet they make up around 56% of sports betting companies revenues, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A majority of these companies offer free money to those who sign up but actually have tons of deceptive information in fine prints. A lawsuit in Massachusetts was placed against DraftKings for offering $1,000 in bonus bets but only if you deposited five times that amount within 90 days and placed $25,000 in bets. Though you must be 21 years old to bet in some states, there are apps that get around those laws, such as Fliff, that use fake currency, which can be exchanged for real currency if you win.
Not only do these websites encourage bad habits of the people using them, but they also open a floodgate of hate for professional athletes. Now even some colleges and universities are partnering with betting companies, allowing these floodgates to open on college athletes who are at their most impressionable during this age. Many hateful messages can be spread, and they may be coming from their classmates sitting right next to them.
These gambling sites also have so much data and information collected on us that they will purposefully send out enticing emails to those who are trying to quit or clearly have exhibited a problem. These sports betting sites and companies are clearly only here for profit and to take advantage of the younger population of people who are not yet fully developed in making informed decisions.
