Betting Alone

I worry America cannot survive this. “This” can mean many things. For today at least, I mean sports betting.

Now, I’m aware that gambling on sports isn’t new. As far back as we can see evidence of spectator sports, we can find evidence of gambling. On every continent, at any time, anywhere in history, among almost any people, sports seems to have existed (at least in part) to facilitate gambling.

Modern sports are no exception. But they are different in another, very new way. Beginning in the late 19th century and ramping quickly through the 20th, contemporary sports culture became something completely new in the history of the world. Organized teams formed leagues within which they came to compete for some magic combination of public attention and the sheer joy of achievement. And money, of course; but the money is contingent on the attention, which is contingent on the achievement. It’s a self-reinforcing system. Achievement earns attention, which provides eyeballs, the meat most coveted by advertisers, who provide the money to pay the athletes to continue achieving. So, while it can be fairly said that the sports industry is driven by advertising money, that money is driven by other things—the vicarious joy, the awe of bearing witness to human excellence, and the culture of sharing it with others.

Meanwhile, gambling has been tightly, geographically controlled for most of the last century. In the US, to gamble on sports, you went to a bookie. Depending on when and where you were, that bookie might have been an illegal one. If not, they worked for a casino. Legal or otherwise, the bookie had an assortment of pre-selected wagers to choose from, selected because they maximized the house’s chance of winning. Unlike regular casino attractions—roulette, craps, slot machines trimmed in neon to hide the drying puddles on the floor—sports betting is something you can actually be better at, if not strictly speaking good. While it’s still a reliable way to lose your money, sports outcomes are not strictly determined by luck, so knowledgeable, careful gamblers beat the house often enough over the long term to make sports betting a low-margin offering for traditional casinos. Getting those gamblers to come through the casino doors, however, increased the odds they could be redirected elsewhere. The house hoped it could draw you in, grease your wheels with cheap booze and the sweet nectar of small victories, then roll you out onto the floor where you’d lose more money more reliably.

All of this, sports and sports betting, has been around for a long time. But the real innovation of modern sports is what the fans have created from it: sports culture. The limitations on gambling created enough space for spectator sports to evolve into a new social role, where teams became the gravity well around which tight orbits of community coalesced. Neighbors became fans, fandoms became tribal affiliations that passed the culture along to the next generation, creating new artifacts, experiences, and traditions along the way.

Critically, the real stakes here are almost zero. Yes, when Auburn lost the Iron Bowl in 1999, I went to bed crying. I was thirteen. And yes, when I was 28 and Auburn lost the Iron Bowl in 2014, I at the very least wanted to go to bed crying. But that’s perfectly scannable within the context of sports. It matters a lot to my heart that Auburn beat Alabama as often as possible. But I don’t actually hate Alabama. Not in a way that matters. Not in a political way. So the real stakes are fake, but the fake stakes are very real. This is something I carry with me everywhere. There’s nowhere in the southeastern United States I can’t find a conversation partner with college football. None. In fact, there are few places anywhere in America that I couldn’t find someone to talk college football with. Or failing that, basketball or soccer.

But in 2018, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that changed something. The case was Murphy v. NCAA. The ruling overturned a federal law that had sharply limited sports betting outside of Nevada. Sports betting immediately shifted from the tightly controlled side hustle of mobsters and casinos to a fully optimized, gamified app in your pocket. It’s pinging your watch. You tapped the banner by accident and now you’re looking at five-leg parlays on Indian Premier League cricket. You don’t even watch baseball, but now you know a second definition for “bowling” and you’re down $250. You’ve got money-money in it.

The real stakes have risen. And as they rise, the fake stakes are fading.

I want you to imagine sports as a third space. Third spaces—churches, coffee shops, parks—are neutral places where you don’t have to spend much money to socialize. They’ve been disappearing in recent decades. Or rather, they’ve been monetized. Imagine sports this way, but as a conversation. America can be a contentious place, especially at the moment, with the real stakes of our politics pushing both the real and felt differences between us ever wider. In fact, I think you could make the case that politics has become totalizing in a way that few could’ve imagined fifteen years ago. Almost any touchpoint between strangers is a potential live wire. Between you and every new acquaintance are dark floodwaters and precious little dry ground. And not without reason. We have much to work out politically and the project grows larger every day. 

But we are a country. It’s more than just nice to be able to establish a rapport with strangers on dry ground before wading into murkier waters. Small talk is something we all complain about, but it’s vital to a society. Sports—the culture, the shared language, the harmless thrill of a cosmically meaningless rivalry, the joy of solidarity in meeting a member of your tribe far from home—is small talk par excellence. Rapport without risk, common matters without conflicting meaning, connection without stakes.

Speaking of stakes: There’s a reason it’s also a gambling term. To have real stakes is to have something to lose, and that doesn’t always mean money. Modern sports fandom is an entertainment and cultural environment largely insulated from both real financial and social stakes. This is especially true in the United States. While the overall tendency has been toward more neutrality, more “third-space-ification” in sports globally, European sports have long been plagued by a parallel subculture of hooliganism that overtly feeds on political, racial, and religious fractures, and leaves generations of ill will and a trail of bodies behind it. That has faded dramatically in recent decades. By contrast, American sports culture is and has long been almost uniquely hostile to overt indicators of real-world partisanship of any flavor. U.S. sporting events were tailored for families, and for creating a neverland experience where you could watch your sports and mostly imagine that other affiliations of partisanship, religion, class, and race have no bearing upon it. A fantasy, to be sure; but a powerful one. Gender has been the exception, of course. Women’s sports have always been held in a kind of commercial and attentional ghetto. But even that’s been breaking down with little fanfare for decades now, with the growing popularity of women’s soccer and basketball claiming ever larger chunks of cultural territory.

The explosion of gambling changes this dynamic. I would argue it directly threatens it. Whether tightly controlled or completely unregulated, gambling reintroduces stakes in direct proportion to how widespread it is—very real, and immediate, stakes. Two strangers who were once just fans in love with a sport now have more than just emotional skin in the game when they find themselves chatting about the match last night. Small talk is a critical social game. Ubiquitous live stakes radically alter the nature of that social game. The role of sports as small talk par excellence is eroded by the introduction of money on the line. The proliferation of gambling apps, prediction markets, and managed fantasy leagues has ensured that those two strangers aren’t just shooting the breeze, arguing balls and strikes, or playing armchair quarterback anymore. Now, they’re comparing lines, parlays, and trading rumors of injuries. They’re talking about dollars, not defensive lines.

This quickly slides into trading the most rapidly inflating currency of our age—conspiracy theories. Did the receiver go down before crossing the goal line because it was the high-IQ play in that situation, or did he do it to keep the over from hitting? Did the ref make a bad call or is she on the take? It doesn’t help that dozens of such cases have been discovered in recent years, or that just this summer, Texas Tech briefly threatened the very foundations of college football to protect a quarterback who’d bet on his own team. We’ve put these dark incentives in place. We cannot be surprised when some people choose to follow them, even if doing so is destructive to the entire enterprise. The vicarious joy, the thrill of achievement, and the camaraderie bleed out of everything, replaced by suspicion, avarice, and hollow visions of dollar signs. When it gets bad enough, the irrational passion of those blessedly fake, cultural stakes can be scooped out entirely, to be replaced with toxic, violent demands that players get to work, not at winning, but at making you money. The noxious weeds of widespread distrust spread further across the face of the country, choking out everything beautiful in their path. 

None of this matters to the mobile gambling applords. They don’t care about the social fabric. They don’t even really care about sports all that much. They are using every tool we’ve made available to them to sprint, hurdle, and dive toward exponential profitability. If you’ll recall what I said about sports betting earlier, this shouldn’t really be possible. Before mobile gambling, sports betting was sufficiently low-margin so as to function as a casino’s loss leader. It got you in the door. The profit margins were thin and knowledge could be used to limit losses. You wouldn’t get rich, but over the course of a season, a careful bettor who knew their sport might even walk away in the black.

Mobile gambling companies knew this. They compensate for it with two mechanisms:

1. If you’re a good bettor, they’ll ban you. Sometimes without your payout.
2. They’ve deployed the full addiction-seeking power of the smartphone.

The first is tasteless. Unsportsmanlike, even. Banning good bettors or refusing large payouts is nothing but discrimination against the lucky and the sober.

But the second is where the danger is. It uses the logic of online gaming (itself the source of a slightly different gambling problem), social media, and psychology to monopolize the attention of its users. If banning the winners is discrimination against the sober, this is the intentional creation of a new class of addicts. The interminable disclaimers about the dangers of addiction don’t matter when you can just opt not to read them because they harsh the vibe.

While it’s destroying the social role of spectator sports on the one hand, it’s creating endless personal tragedy on the other, and doing so at a scale that we will be reckoning with for a generation. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates the annual social costs of problem gambling alone to be north of $14 billion in bankruptcies, healthcare costs, and the like; but the total losses are staggering—over $240 billion last year for the United States alone (that’s about $700 in gambling losses per American, not per gambler!). This is especially disastrous for young men, who have been the near exclusive target of these firms until relatively recently.

Taken alone, these developments would be a tragedy, a degradation of important and unique parts of our shared experience. It wears down the experience of fandom and hollows out the common culture it creates. It leaves people less connected to each other across our differences, and threatens precious institutions that run from the hyperlocal to the grand, international complex that gives us the Olympics, the World Cup, the NBA, and Formula 1. It poisons the wellspring of human excellence that gave rise to Lionel Messi, Michael Jordan, Marshawn Lynch, and Diego Maradona. 

But they can’t be taken alone. The proliferation of predatory sports betting is representative of a much larger crisis. The last decade has produced an incredible flowering of scam industries, each reinforcing and feeding the other. From sports betting to cryptocurrency to wellness schlock to, perhaps, social media itself, an inordinate amount of our collective investment, both of money and attention, have flooded new industries that peddle misery. They drain our bank accounts and grind away our ability to trust one another. We have to address them.

I’m not sure America can survive if we don’t.

Featured image is "Banditti Gambling," John Hall 1780. Edited.