One of the more incredible developments we have seen in sports in recent years is how quickly previous professional and amateur sports have changed their views on sports gambling, morphing from gambling is bad and illegal, to what we see today — gambling is great, and you are encouraged to do it as often as you can! Obviously there are very lucrative incentives for sports leagues to change their views on gambling, but what about everything else that comes with gambling? Not only are athletes now regularly tempted to place bets themselves (and break what few rules remain around prohibiting gambling), millions more sports fans –including those who never gambled when gambling was illegal — have now found themselves caught up with sports betting. In fact, recent reports indicate that the fastest growing segment of gambling addicts appears to be young men who bet on sports. So while there are more profits for pro and college sports, there are also new questions regarding fair play on the field (i.e. who might be throwing a game?), and more young men struggling with a gambling addiction, mental health issues, and substance abuse concerns. Is this healthy progress for sports, or the result of a series of short-sighted choices by today’s sport leaders who approved legalized sports gambling?
A quickly growing & serious problem
If you think it’s hyperbole to suggest that sports gambling is rapidly becoming a very big problem, read what a spokesperson for Gambling Anonymous recently said about the impact of sports betting for young men, especially those under age 40:
It should come as no surprise that sports gambling is most affecting young men, as young men are the primary consumers of sport — and most likely to have all the technology needed to make bets around the clock. When you add in the still-developing brain for young men in their late teens/early twenties, it becomes easy to see why so many young men are experiencing gambling (and related mental health) problems right now.
As people continue to gamble on sports, and increasingly more people become addicted to gambling and experience the negative consequences from gambling, the big question is what will happen next? It is very unlikely that we ever go back to illegal sports gambling, and it’s just as doubtful that people will suddenly find the discipline to ward off the urge to place sport bets. Will more regular public service announcements do the trick? While people still smoke cigarettes, the tobacco industry was eventually forced to list health concerns on tobacco packages in 1965. Will people refrain from gambling if they see more anti-gambling advertisements, or would those efforts have minimal value?
Final thoughts
Sports betting is fun and exciting, and it is largely emotionally (and spontaneously) driven. Fans can bet on individual games, parlays, and even prop bets (i.e. how many points a player will score in a game). There are kiosks everywhere, televisions all over the stadium, and countless apps that can be downloaded to your phone. While sports betting can appear to be an amazing experience, there are countless people each day that lose much of what they have (and sometimes everything) from lost bets, experience mental health issues, and develop substance abuse issues all related to the sudden collapse of their previous life as they knew it. Corrections most certainly need to be made, but with the windfall of money coming in from sports gambling it is difficult to see those changes happening anytime soon.
drstankovich.com
