How the quick high of ‘fast-food gambling' ensnared young men

The Guardian

31-01-2025

Watching televised sports in 2025 can feel a little like sitting through one long gambling commercial, interspersed by occasional flashes of actual games. Those sports, meanwhile, are played in venues and uniforms plastered with the logos of yet more betting houses, airing on broadcasts that sprinkle in mentions of gambling sponsors.
The experience on sports podcasts and websites and apps is much the same. But why? As the biggest event on the US sports calendar – the Super Bowl – approaches, how did we get to a place where sports have been reduced to a kind of raw material to be refined and packaged into the real product: the no-sweat, profit-boosted, five-leg, in-game parlay bonus bet?
The answer is simple: because the mushrooming sports betting industry has converted an advertising blitz – pegged at more than a billion dollars a year from 2021 through 2023 by the American Gaming Association – into a highly effective machine for drawing and keeping customers, particularly young men. As one addiction expert says: 'Gambling offers the false promise of spectacular success. The psyche of young men has not changed. But every societal touchstone is promoting gambling expansion.'
In 2018, the US supreme court overturned a federal law that banned states from legalizing sports betting – with Nevada grandfathered in. Thirty-eight states rushed to allow sports gambling in a half-blind pursuit of the attendant tax revenues. At the same time, 30 of them also permitted mobile and online gambling. Last year, Americans wagered about $150bn on sports, up 23% from 2023 and more than 50% from 2022. The sports betting handle in 2023 was more than $1,000 per capita in seven different states.
At the same time, total bankruptcies have climbed by as much as 30% in the states where sports betting is newly legal. Calls to problem gambling hotlines are soaring. And Gamblers Anonymous meetings are seeing an influx of young, male attendees, who are disproportionately affected.
Somewhere between 60 and 80% of high school students reported having gambled in the last year, the National Council on Problem Gambling reported in 2023. A study commissioned by the NCAA found that 58% of 18-to-22-year-olds had bet on sports – although it should be said that in most states this is illegal before the age of 21. On college campuses, that number was 67%, and the betting happened at a higher frequency. While most people can limit gambling to a bit of occasional fun, medical journal the Lancet published a paper in November finding that 16.3% of adolescents worldwide who bet on sports developed a gambling addiction. (The Sports Betting Alliance, an industry group, pointed to studies conducted in Massachusetts, Indiana and Connecticut that found the rate of problem gamblers across the population to be roughly between 1 and 2%.)
It all amounts to a swelling problem as the way we watch, experience and engage with sports has been fundamentally altered by the betting bonanza.
'This is already a public health crisis,' says US representative Paul Tonko. 'Of all the addictions, gambling has the highest potential for suicide attempts of any mental health disorder. When the US supreme court in 2018 gave the green light to states to allow for mobile sports gambling, they did that without consideration of the negative impacts that could be associated with it.'
Tonko is the rare lawmaker in Washington DC with an appetite to take on the sports betting boom, introducing the SAFE Bet Act with US senator Richard Blumentha in September, which aims to create consumer protections around mobile sports gambling and curb advertising. 'You have a very vulnerable audience that is being targeted,' Tonko says. '[The advertising for sports betting] really is designed to pull you in at a tender age, before you're perhaps able to manage that risk assessment.'
Over the course of an NBA or NHL broadcast, the viewer will see the logo of a betting company or hear some reference made to gambling 2.8 times per minute, according to a study.
'ESPN is a 24-7 casino ad right now,' says Dr Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and the co-director of UCLA's Gambling Studies Program. 'The normalization has gone so deep, so fast. [Sports] gambling has gone so viral that it's beyond normalization. It's endemic.'
Not all that long ago, legalized sports gambling anywhere in the US but Nevada was unthinkable. This message was shouted at the public most loudly by the very leagues that now swim in betting money. Which is to say that the gambling industry, such as it was then, had two hurdles to clear: the law and the zeitgeist. While placing a bet with a guy you knew was hardly uncommon, something about it felt illicit. It wasn't the sort of thing you would want your mom to know about. By carpet-bombing our culture with ads, though, the sports betting industry polished its reputation, one ad at a time. How can something be wrong when it's everywhere and seemingly everyone is doing it?
Before long, everyone was doing it. If you were surrounded by young men, at any rate.
'The success of mobile, real-time gambling is coinciding with evolutions in technology and that's a big part of it,' says Dr Stephen Shapiro, a sports management professor at the University of South Carolina who researches sports gambling and consumer behavior. 'There would be so many more barriers to entry in the past. You would have to go to a sports book and bet in more of a seedy environment. A college-aged student would have been less likely to partake in it.' Whereas gambling used to be a solitary pursuit, young men now do it together as a bonding experience. Mobile betting is woven into the social fabric of dorm life.
Mobile sports betting apps perform so well for their creators because they have been optimized to get users to gamble more and gamble faster, experts say. To chase the action, in the betting parlance. That's why betting on games is no longer limited to a lone wager on the outcome, or a player's performance over the course of the whole contest. Instead, it has been broken down into hundreds – sometimes thousands – of mini-bets on every last play and possibility, the in-game bets powered by the advanced metrics the leagues sell the betting companies.
The psychology of sports betting apps is modeled on the slot machine, argues Dr Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University and the founder and president of its Public Health Advocacy Institute. The apps are designed to be played quickly and aggressively to trigger repeated hits of dopamine and, eventually, addiction. 'This has nothing to do with ordinary sports betting,' Daynard says. 'Until you had online sports betting, nobody had ever bet on whether the next pitch was going to be faster or slower than 95 mph. You're betting on all these micro-propositions. It's just an opportunity to push the button.'
'Fast-food gambling is essentially what this is,' adds Fong. 'Highly processed gambling, sanitized and synthesized by a computer that is exactly designed to hit the dopamine.'
The AI-powered in-game bets appear and disappear so fast that it's impossible for the user to work out whether the odds on them are worth the wager. If the art of successful sports gambling is spotting inefficiencies or outright errors in the betting lines, that edge is negated by the lightning-fast decision-making required for these bets. And that's exactly the point, to accelerate the heedless users' betting action and the mathematical probability that they will lose. The sharp betters, after all, know better than to touch those sorts of wagers.
'Gambling addiction has nothing to do with money. It has to do with how the product makes you feel, the action, the anticipation,' says Dr Harry Levant, a gambling addiction therapist and the director of PHAI at Northeastern. 'The light-up of the dopamine occurs in the anticipation of the result, not the actual result. What's happened here is we've taken a known addictive product and we've come up with a way to market and distribute it to people at lightspeed. If you take a 22-year-old, whose risk-reward system of their brain is not formed until they're 26, and you give them an addictive product, and you push it at them at light speed, you're going to hurt them.'
The smartphone, meanwhile, is itself built to function as a dopamine-delivery machine. It is the perfect device to exacerbate the gambler's worst impulses. Smartphones are designed to keep you coming back to them, picking them up throughout the day and flicking through the same few apps for fresh dopamine hits from messages, content or games. Betting apps readily offer all of those. And once they have burrowed into your digital routine, they are hard to ignore. To the gambling addict, having betting apps on their phone is a little like an alcoholic taking up residence in the brewery, or a meth addict living inside his dealer's lab.
One of the biggest betting firms, FanDuel, denies that its app purposely dials up dopamine and points out that it is compliant with regulations. 'FanDuel works in strict accordance with all laws and standards set forth by each state regulator,' a spokesperson said.
The Responsible Online Gaming Association, which represents most of the major sports books including FanDuel and DraftKings, said in a statement that 'All our operators' mobile platforms feature responsible gaming tools, including deposit limits, time limits, wager limits, and time-out features, which allow users to set personal limits to help ensure their experience remains recreational.'
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As he spoke in the middle of a Monday morning, Levant pulled his phone from his pocket. He had no FanDuel account – Levant is a recovering gambling addict himself, after all – but within a few seconds and a few taps, he had downloaded the app and was a final click away from being able to bet on the next serve of a second-tier Challenger tennis tournament in Buenos Aires between two players he, and most everyone else, had never heard of. And then on the next serve and the next. 'The human brain is not built to handle that level of constant action,' Levant says. 'The product itself isn't designed for recreational purposes. Why is that bet here right now? Why is there betting on every serve?'
Because, as one FanDuel slogan puts it, the thing is to 'Make every moment more.' Betting is marketed as a second-screen experience to augment the emotion of watching a game. You're supposed to cherish even the so-called garbage time late in games when the outcome is almost certain, again per FanDuel, and invest in every last play.
Another FanDuel motto: 'Never waste a hunch.' The betting houses subtly suggest that skill and knowledge will inoculate you from risk. That if you know ball, you're not really gambling.
There seems to be a broad belief among sports betters that they aren't merely gambling on the odds of something happening, like putting their chips on 22 black at the roulette table or telling the croupier to hit them with another card in blackjack. Rather, they believe that they are monetizing their innate knowledge and feel for a sport. An Australian study backs this up, finding that young, male sports gamblers' 'knowledge, skill, and control reduced beliefs about risks and contributed to risky patterns of sports betting regardless of their individual risk or problem gambling status.'
The reading of risk is also clouded by the special offers a sports betting company will ping to your phone whenever you haven't placed a wager in a while. A different Australian study found that betting inducements gave young men a feel of greater control over betting outcomes. Yet another study suggested that those inducements produce riskier betting behavior.
Still, they are hard to ignore when they blow up your phone. 'People are stepping back [from mobile betting] because they're hurting,' says Mark Gottlieb, executive director of the PHAI. 'They know this is a struggle for them. And then they are provided with odds-boosts and deposit matches very aggressively through text-messaging, in-app messaging and emails. The technology is there for these platforms to recognize that certain customers are demonstrating potentially problem-gambling behaviors.'
'These promotions are designed to keep you in action,' says Levant. 'They're doing what your neighborhood drug dealer does. They don't want you to pause.'
FanDuel denies this, pointing to wide-ranging efforts to prevent and help problem gamblers. 'FanDuel and its parent company Flutter invested $100m in responsible gaming technology, advocacy and product development in 2024,' the spokesperson said.
Fong, the father of two sports-besotted teenaged boys, frets that the culture navigated by today's young men only exacerbates the allure of mobile sports gambling. The podcasts they listen to and the influencers they take their cues from all echo the same message, Fong says. Namely, they have no worth if they aren't getting rich quick and outsmarting their peers along the way. 'Particularly young men go, 'OK, I've been told I need to make spectacular success,'' says Fong. 'You combine it with massive, massive advertising. All those forces are pointing towards that 18-to-24-year-old guy, tickling his dopamine circuits. Gambling offers the false promise of spectacular success. The psyche of young men has not changed. But every societal touchstone is promoting gambling expansion.'
Yet once gambling tips over into addiction, the stigma remains pervasive. In fact, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the standard guideline for mental health – did not reclassify a gambling problem from an impulse-control disorder to an addictive disorder until 2013.
What's more, it is perhaps the easiest addiction to hide. 'Unlike other addictions, there are no natural, visible warning signs,' says Levant. 'You can't drink $1,000 of vodka in one night. I can make a $1,000 bet right now and I'll show no visible manifestation.'
In a space where young men bond over their love and knowledge of sports, and betting has become central to this dynamic, being open about lost bets challenges their image of themselves and their status within the group. Until the money runs out and their problem becomes impossible to hide, they chase their losses and dig themselves into an ever deeper hole.
After all, their phone is right there, in their pockets, promising a solution. It's a more appealing prospect than admitting to their friends that they do not, in fact, know ball.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men's national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist College.