A few years ago, I accidentally won $2,000 on FanDuel.
At the time, the gambling app was running a promotion that would gift you $1,000 to bet risk-free if you deposited $1,000 of real cash into your account. A group of my friends with whom I gamble recreationally (as I’d describe it) discovered that if you deposited the “real” $1,000 in your FanDuel account, bet the app’s “free” $1,000 and then withdrew your real cash, the app would still let your bet stand. “It’s a free $1,000” is how one friend described it. This was in the early days of legalized sports betting, in 2022, when gambling apps were competing for users and, generally speaking, the entire space was like the Wild West.
I placed my $1,000 wager, but there was one problem: When you made the bet, you had to toggle an option to use the “free bonus bet” money. Nobody told me that, or it was so obvious nobody thought it needed explaining. In my haste to get my free $1,000 bet locked before the game started, I accidentally bet the $1,000 of real money I had deposited into my account. It was an alarming, stomach-dropping, and uncomfortable-to-lose amount of money that I never would have wagered intentionally. Realizing my mistake, I immediately put the free $1,000 on a different bet, hoping I could somehow hedge against the unintentionally large risk I had just taken.
When I told my friends about the mistake, they responded with unanimous laughter and very little sympathy. My bets were placed, and there was no going back. The game was the AFC Divisional playoff matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills. One of my bets was that the Chiefs would win. The other was that Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ tight end, would score a touchdown. The game ended up being one of the best in NFL history: The Bills scored a go-ahead touchdown to take a three-point lead with 13 seconds left in regulation, which — in 99.9% of football games — would have been my death sentence. I remember sinking into the couch and my friends looking at me uncomfortably, trying to hold in laughter but maybe — also — starting to feel a little bad for me.
Then the Chiefs, by the grace of quarterback Patrick Mahomes, managed to get into field goal range in just two plays and tie the game. Minutes into overtime, with the game tied 36–36, Mahomes threw Kelce a gorgeous back-shoulder fade. Draped by a linebacker, Kelce got both hands on the ball, tapped both feet in bounds, and tumbled out of the end zone for the game-winning touchdown as the stadium erupted. In other words: Both my $1,000 bets hit at the same time, on the same play, to end the game.
I more than doubled my money, and my friends and I went absolutely ballistic. It was one of the most exhilarating explosions of football fandom I’ve ever experienced. I rushed home in a wave of excitement to tell my newly minted wife what just happened, rehashing the scene breathlessly: An accidental bet! $2,000! Diamond hands! I didn’t blink! Last play of the game! Travis Kelce touchdown! Chiefs win! We just made $2,000!
Phoebe, in a moment of deep clarity, shot up off the couch and pierced my elation with a look like I’d just excitedly shared news of my infidelity. “You bet $2,000 on a fucking football game?!” was her approximate response. “What is wrong with you?”
All I could think was, well, when you put it like that… it doesn’t sound so good.
Four years later, the U.S. is in the throes of the legal sports betting experiment. And if you look around, we may be headed for a moral panic, too.
Broadly speaking, moral panics are widespread, exaggerated fears that certain trends threaten a society’s core values and interests. In the U.S., we’ve had moral panics about comic books, marijuana use, stranger danger, satanic cults, violent video games and groomers, to name just a few. In this case, the widespread adoption of sports betting has led to a cottage industry of articles declaring everything from a new wave of youth addiction to the total breakdown and corruption of professional (and even collegiate) sports.
“Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums and music combined,” blared FORTUNE. 11 year-olds are being sucked into online gambling sites, then selling their parents’ things to pay off debts, NPR tells us. A New York Times opinion piece argues, “We’re getting America’s children hooked on gambling.” Axios described it as America “scaling sin.” STAT News called it a “twofold public health crisis” for young men.
Meanwhile, NBA players and coaches have been indicted for wagering on their own games, leading to a growing belief that professional athletes and referees are now rigging games. Or, put more broadly, that gambling is ruining sports. Of course, perverse incentives for athletes are just one part of the puzzle; sports betting is also capturing the attention of sports’ young, male audience. One survey found 36% of boys aged 11 to 17 have gambled in the past year, and about 12% of boys have placed bets on sports. Those are astonishing stats that merit anxiety from any parent who reads them. And, obviously, many of us can’t turn on the television or scroll social media without being inundated with legal gambling ads, which is now a quantifiable trend.
Today, any thinkpiece you read about gambling is likely advancing the notion that we are living in some kind of gambling dystopia, where teens are stealing their parents’ credit cards and gambling away their life savings while single men are too busy betting all their crypto on NFL parlays to start a family or build a career.
At the same time, only 29% of U.S. adults view gambling as morally wrong, while 43% view legal sports betting as bad for society. Those numbers actually paint a fairly nuanced picture of public perception (i.e., little judgment on gambling, but growing distaste for frictionless legal sports betting). I’ve been watching the coverage of this issue for several years now, and I feel pretty conflicted, too.
I don’t want to downplay the risks: Legalized sports betting has added a new, culturally accepted addictive activity to our society. Along with alcohol, drugs and all manner of screentime, we now have another degenerate behavior with a risk of addiction to worry about. Worse yet, it fits neatly into the most pessimistic view of our lonely, socially isolated, internet-addicted society. It’s easy to read these articles and imagine an epidemic of 20-something males awake at 2 AM, bleary-eyed and overweight, with blue-lit faces staring down at a list of FanDuel parlays.
And yet, very little that I see or experience resembles anything close to the panicky headlines I’m reading in the press. More importantly, the evidence of an actual spike in gambling addicts is far more sparse than you might think. Personally, almost everything I’ve experienced related to gambling — which has been a fair amount — paints a pretty different picture. And as a male in my mid-30s with some disposable income, I’m the target market here, the one supposedly most at risk.
Consider this astounding fact about me that I’m somewhat ashamed, reticent, and embarrassed to share:
