Sportsmanship and Online Gambling

By Sean Gough

Vice-Chairperson of the Board of Directors

What if it were proposed that online sports gambling is bad for sportsmanship and bad for competition?      
 
It's not a legalistic argument.  The laws might've opened the door, but for most of us without legal expertise, the laws are not the issue.      
 
It's not a moralistic or a puritanical argument.  Addiction and debt are real, but gambling itself is not the problem, nor is it new.      
 
Most importantly, the argument that online sports gambling is harmful is not an argument that online sports gambling is the most harmful or the most widespread form of addiction.  Uncomfortable though it may be, Americans have shown to average 7+ hours daily with social media and 4+ added hours with screens generally.  One might argue that this could exceed the hours that any screens are needed for business, emergencies, or keeping in touch with family and friends.  Addiction to these screens, instead, is the vast, "hidden in plain sight" addiction that has isolated and torn our society apart in ways that sports gambling can't even if the makers of their websites tried.  And it's this bigger addiction to screens that has turbocharged online sports gambling.     
 
The historian Timothy Snyder explains that the basis of our algorithms is the behaviorist experiments that were done with pigeons and rats in the 20th Century.  The pigeons and rats were given a lever that sometimes contained food and sometimes did not.  What the scientists conducting the experiment found was that the pigeons and rats kept returning to the lever, not understanding the experiment being done to them.  This is social media, which uses the data from our behavior to hook us, by giving us first what we like and then what we fear.  This is the basis of modern advertising, which alternates between seduction and violence, as well as comfort and shock.  And obviously it is the basis of gambling, where the house always wins, but the customer returns for the rare lever that rewards.      
 
But it's more than just the design model:  it's the conditions.  Snyder highlights five ways we are hooked by algorithms and screens.  "Experimental loneliness ... Intermittent reinforcement ... Confirmation bias ... Social conformity ... [and] Cognitive dissonance."  Intermittent reinforcement:  we already explained.  Experimental loneliness is the fact that with the phone, you can gamble from anywhere, at any time, for anything, at any point in the game, without anyone to discourage you.  Confirmation bias is watching sports regularly and forgetting how these gambling websites have intruded, how they are being pushed, and how they were not pushed until relatively recently.  Social conformity is the gambling websites' and sports' leagues ads portraying gambling in a way that's just fun with your friends, just part of being a fan.  And cognitive dissonance is the knowledge that gambling is risky, that you probably can't afford that bet, but screw it, it's fun, everyone's doing it, and heck, you might get rich.      

So again, it is not just the fact that online sports gambling is legal.  It is that college and professional sports leagues have partnered with online sports gambling websites, plastered their jerseys and arenas with their brands, and made deals with the gambling websites that profit the leagues by encouraging fans to separate themselves from their hard-earned money.  When the business model is not just the leagues making money, but tricking fans into thinking that sports can make the fans money even when they do not, the main interest in sports isn't even the tribal appeal of rooting for a team anymore.  It's the nihilistic pursuit of fake money.      

It doesn't breed fans of the team or fans of the game.  It shatters both parts of the "it's not who wins or loses, it's how you play the game."  It's neither.  The sport has been made incidental.  The gambling is the game.  And there are no rules except you give the gambling websites their money.      
 
The gambler thinks they're on offense, but the house guarantees they are on defense.  For the leagues and the fans, it's a strictly financial affair, in a way that makes overpriced luxury boxes seem an exemplar of sportsmanship by comparison.      
 
But "when we see how [these conditions] work, we can escape [their] predictification.  That will require changing the internet, but it will also require doing other things with our bodies than staring at screens.  It is our move." (Excerpts from Timothy Snyder, 101 to 108, On Freedom, 2024.)