In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that states can regulate sports betting. For a century prior the practice had been mostly identified in our cultural imagination with public scandal, the mob, and the promotion of vice. Outside of Las Vegas, sports gambling lingered in the long shadow of the infamous “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, which resulted in eight players on the Chicago White Sox receiving lifetime bans from Major League Baseball for accepting payments from bookies to throw that year’s World Series.
Today, sports gambling is legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia. A fan can’t watch televised sports without being bombarded by commercials for sports betting apps and odds scrolling across the ticker at the bottom of the screen. In some cases, fans can’t watch sports at all without subscribing to a streaming service that is owned by a gambling company. The sports betting revolution has proven immensely profitable for teams, leagues, and even athletes, all of whom benefit from the revenue. But at what cost socially?
In recent years, a growing chorus of voices has sounded the alarm about the societal scourge of sports gambling in particular and the widespread proliferation of gambling in general. The volume increases with every fresh scandal when players collude with bookies or athletes receive death threats for costing gamblers a big payday. Americans across the political spectrum have voiced their concerns, and both Christians and non-Christians have weighed in on this issue. WORLD Opinions periodically publishes columns related to this topic.
In the past few weeks, two major periodicals have published lengthy articles about the ubiquity of sports betting and its deleterious effects. Neither outlet is a bastion of social conservatism. First, The New Republic published a review essay of two recent books on this subject: Danny Funt’s Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling and Jonathan Cohen’s Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. The books’ respective titles make the point. The essay’s author, Jacob Bacharach, raises concerns that the half-measures taken by sports-betting companies to prevent problematic gambling aren’t enough to counteract the negative impact pervasive gambling is having on American society.
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