\n Legal wagers on sports grew to $160 billion last year in the United States \u2014far more than the just over $100 billion spent on lottery tickets, according to Matheson. Gross gambling revenue, which is the amount wagered less than the amount paid out on winning bets, grew to $13.7 billion, up 23% from 2023, according to the American Gaming Association, an industry trade group. Most of that is wagered online, not in physical casinos.\n <\/p>\n
\n Sports gambling has become a huge industry in less than a decade, and it\u2019s still growing. It\u2019s not surprising that much of that money is spilling into the sports teams\u2019 coffers.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe raw numbers (of sports gambling) \u2014 I don\u2019t think \u2014 are eye-popping yet,\u201d said Michael Lewis, author of \u201cMoneyball\u201d and \u201cThe Blind Side,\u201d and whose podcast \u201cAgainst the Rules\u201d just did a season about sports gambling. \u201cBut the fact that it\u2019s new revenue \u2014 and new revenues are hard to find \u2014 has got everybody way excited about it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n But that direct support brought in via sponsorships is only a fraction of the billions that teams and leagues get because fans are betting on games. The sports books spend hundreds of millions on advertising annually, primarily during games, along with pregame and post-game shows, according to MediaRadar,<\/a> which tracks and estimates ad spending. That lifts the networks\u2019 or streaming services\u2019 revenue \u2014 and thus the rights fees they\u2019re willing to pay.\n <\/p>\n \n Betting drives more overall revenue for sports, thus further lifting broadcast and streaming rights deals into the tens of billions. And that\u2019s all the more important in this age of declining viewership, when all forms of entertainment are fighting for the public\u2019s attention.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s a way to keep fans engaged in meaningless games,\u201d said Lewis. \u201cIn an era when people\u2019s attention spans seem to shrink by the moment \u2026 this is like the future of the way that a fan engages with the sport.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Unlike professional leagues and teams, the NCAA doesn\u2019t have sponsorship deals with sports books. In a case of bad timing, just before Thursday\u2019s news broke of the NBA scandal, the NCAA announced it would allow college athletes and staff to bet on professional sports<\/a> starting November 1.\n <\/p>\n \n But even as the NCAA continues to keep its distance from sports gambling and prohibits players from betting on college sports, the NCAA benefits from the huge fan interest and viewership in its \u201cMarch Madness\u201d basketball tournaments. Even casual fans have money riding on the games\u2019 outcomes, bringing in an estimated $3.1 billion in wagers in 2024, according to the American Gaming Association.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cHow do you convince networks to pay a billion dollars a year for college basketball? It\u2019s because a ton of people tune in,\u201d Matheson said. \u201cAnd why do so many people tune in to college basketball during March Madness? It\u2019s because obviously everyone builds out a bracket, right? So that\u2019s a perfect example of indirect benefits.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Legalized sports gambling was mostly limited to Las Vegas casinos until a Supreme Court decision in 2018 opened the door for it nationwide. But there has always been gambling in sports, Matheson said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe have clear evidence of gambling in the ancient Olympics that started in 776 BC,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, sports betting is basically as old as organized sports itself.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But this is a form of gambling that wasn\u2019t available in the past, with fans having the chance to bet on small occurrences within a game through what is known as prop bets, and not just on the final outcome.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis is way different from the seventh century BC,\u201d said Lewis. \u201cThis is having a casino in your pocket.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Thursday\u2019s criminal charges suggest that the leagues weren\u2019t prepared for the risks of bad actions by some of the players, said Jonathan D. Cohen, author of \u201cLosing Big: America\u2019s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cLeagues sort of wandered into this sort of not really knowing what they\u2019re getting into, just knowing that they could make a lot of money off of it,\u201d Cohen told CNN\u2019s Omar Jimenez on Friday.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt just speaks to this sort of recklessness with which we dove in,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cI think we should have legal sports betting. We should maybe even have legal online sports betting. But it didn\u2019t have to be this way if we had just taken a more careful approach.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Thursday\u2019s arrests and charges involving the NBA follow suspensions of two Cleveland Guardians pitchers this summer from an MLB probe of sports betting<\/a>, and suspensions in 2023 of six NFL players for gambling on league games<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n All of these incidents pose risks for leagues that have come to love and depend on the revenue they get from betting apps.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think that (leagues) are going to poison their sports if they don\u2019t watch out,\u201d said Lewis. \u201cWe\u2019re not at the place where people are genuinely questioning the integrity of the sport. But we\u2019re not that far away.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n CNN\u2019s Auzinea Bacon contributed to this report\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"American sports suffered another black eye after the arrests this week of an NBA coach and a current…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-239261","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Online](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/gettyimages-2155741121-20251024203358459.jpg\")
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