Trey Flaherty ‘29
Staff Writer
“It’s become sort of part of the American fabric”, says Emily Stewart of Business Insider when asked about the rise of sports gambling in America. Something that was not legal a decade ago has slithered into our everyday lives. In 2024, the American sports betting industry posted a record $13.7 billion in revenue, a staggering $11.04 billion uptick from the previous year. This popularity isn’t just shown by dollar signs – but also in how we watch sports now. Today, when you walk into a sports bar you see more fans tracking their parlays and individual player over/unders across multiple games than just quaintly watching the TV showing their home team’s game.
The sports betting industry boom has been powered like most booms in America: accessibility (once a few states started legalizing betting, every state did so); advertising (once legal, huge marketing budgets have been poured into omnipresent ads); and technology (anyone with an iPhone and over a certain age can download a betting app and within minutes be placing bets). I leave to others to debate the social and public policy ramifications of the gambling boom. My issue is that sports gambling is affecting the minds of sports fans all over the country – corrupting the way fans watch, think about, and enjoy sports.
I first noticed this a few weeks ago, watching the Patriots (my favorite team) play the Dolphins. In the final two minutes of the game it looked like Devon Achane, running back for the Dolphins, scored a touchdown, turning a Patriots win into a loss. My initial reaction to this should obviously be negative, an opposing player causing a heartbreaking loss. But since I have Achane on my fantasy roster I almost felt happy about it – it would help win my fantasy football game that week. Now the run was called back and the Patriots won – but the conflicted feelings remained. This is the real problem with gambling in sports – corrupting how fans watch and enjoy the sport.
One of the smaller components of sports gambling is fantasy football, something that almost every football fan is involved in. Fantasy football, for those who are unaware, is a game where managers draft players from all over the league and get points when their players perform well. A seemingly harmless game – and incredibly engaging and fun (I’m in five different fantasy football leagues) – but it demonstrates another example of how sports gambling can corrupt how fans watch a game. Since you need “your” players to put up good stats, it creates a sense of “individual stats watching” in fans.
Underperforming players can feel the corrosive culture of fantasy fandom. In an article with Sports Illustrated, Detroit Lions running back David Montgomery said that during his rookie season he was experiencing “suicidal thoughts”, mainly because of harmful messages sent to him by fantasy football managers. Not his own coaches mind you, or his Lions general manager – but fantasy football managers destroying him because he had a bad game. It is clear that when some 15-year-old kid comes home from mowing the lawn on a Sunday and then tears into the David Montgomerys of the world for costing them a fantasy win – the dynamic needs to change.
What needs to change is that we need to remember why sports, or fantasy football, or even the occasional wager exist. They exist to be an escape, a way to unwind. Arthur Brooks, the renowned professor at Harvard Business School, teaches that one of the keys to happiness is to have “useless friends.” Useless friends are those we connect with not for any worldly gain but to feel good. They are “real friends” not “deal friends.”
We now are treating sports like “deal friends” – transactional relationships that exist not for escapist entertainment value, but as the means to limited ends – money or first place in our fantasy league. There is nothing wrong with money or winning first place, but we need to remember why we became fans in the first place – to embrace the shared experience of cheering for our favorite team to win.
Featured Image Courtesy of Ohio State
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