How America Got Hooked On Sports Betting

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Ed Elson (1:28)

Welcome to Simply Put. I'm Ed Elson.

This week, drug dealers.

You've probably seen the Sydney Sweeney ad by now. And if you haven't, you've certainly heard the outrage it caused around the world.

Her lack of clothing led many to accuse her of sexualizing women's sport. One Olympic athlete dubbed it a kick in the face to women. Hundreds of thousands of fans unfollowed her overnight. Another Sydney Sweeney ad. Another global scandal.

Now, I get it. It's crude. But I think people are getting angry about the wrong thing. The problem isn't what she was or wasn't wearing, but rather what she was selling. Specifically, another harmful addiction. One that's ruined thousands of American lives, and in some cases even taken them. Not alcohol, not opiates. Something even more pernicious. Gambling.

Fun as it may be, gambling is one of the most destructive and addictive drugs in the world. Roughly two and a half million American adults meet the criteria for having a severe gambling problem. One in five of them will attempt suicide. The highest rate of any addiction, and almost double the rate of drug or alcohol related cases.

The National Council on Problem Gambling puts the annual social cost in bankruptcies, lost jobs and medical bills at $14 billion.

Despite this, America has made concerted efforts to make it even more accessible. From meme coins to prediction markets, this substance is now legal in various forms. But the most popular strain is the one that Sidney Sweeney undressed for. That strain is known as sports betting. The Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018, and Americans have wagered more than $520 billion on it since then. More than a quarter of adults in the US have a sports betting account, but there's one demographic that loves this drug more than anyone else. Young men. Among that population, the share that owns an online sports book is more than half. Once federally approved, a cascade of states moved to legalize sports betting too.

Those that didn't were the control group, and the impacts were stunning. In states where it was made legal, personal bankruptcies rose 25 to 30 percent within four years. Calls to gambling helplines shot up 75 percent. Diagnoses of gambling disorders increased 61 percent. Meanwhile, household investing failed 14 percent, meaning the money that usually goes into retirement accounts went to draft kings instead. In fact, many young people no longer understand the difference between gambling and investing. More than a quarter of them see sports betting as a viable long-term financial strategy. As a result, the gambling companies are now reigning money.

Between 2020 and 2025, online sports book revenues grew more than 1,000 percent. As with any drug dealer, they make their widest margins off of the most addicted. A 2023 Rutgers study of sports bettors in New Jersey showed that 5 percent of bettors make up 70 percent of the bets. That's also why DraftKings built a machine learning algorithm that specifically targets customers who gamble the most. Jonathan Cohen of the American Institute for Boys and Men described the Sydney Sweeney ad to me as brilliant. It's the perfect distillation, he explained, of the entire issue.

He's right. What better way to lure in sports bettors than marketing a naked Sydney Sweeney? After all, it isn't empowered women who are addicted to sports betting. It is lonely young men. Studies suggest a correlation between male loneliness and online gambling. It's common sense. A young man with too much time on his hands and not enough human connection is more likely to engage in online addictive behaviors. For more than 40 percent of young men, that means porn, and for more than 50 percent, it means sports betting. Sydney Sweeney's ad presented both. Sydney Sweeney is receiving the brunt of my criticism. But let's be clear, she's not alone.

Over the past few years, countless celebrities have used their fame to promote sports betting. Derek Jeter promoted Bet MGM, Eli Manning endorsed FanDuel, Kevin Hart starred in an ad for DraftKings. In fact, just four days before Sweeney's ad dropped, LeBron James started hawking football wagers on Polymarket. The deal was worth a reported $15 million per year, almost four times what he gets paid to play basketball. Does this make them bad people? No, they're getting paid to promote a product that's legal. But if we're going to be up in arms about something, it seems misguided to make it about nudity. The next generation of sports bettors are now taking to the prediction markets, where you can get paid for successfully predicting the results of Ukrainian women's table tennis. It's no different from regular online sports betting. You place a wager, you hope to get paid. The only difference is the regulation. Unlike DraftKings bets, which are legal in only some states, prediction markets bets are legal in all of them. Why?