Sports gambling is now mainstream. It rose from a mostly underground cottage industry of shady bookies to a pervasive online betting enterprise supported by alluring television commercials and gaudy facilities.
In 2023, the total amount of legal sports betting grew by nearly 28% to more than $119 billion, which exceeds the gross domestic product of 15 states. And it will get bigger.
There is a looming price for all the newfound money and rapid growth: the law of unintended consequences. With gambling out in the open, many novice and amateur gamblers are betting more, risking too much and losing more. Emotions are unleashed and boiling points tested, with losers openly blaming and even threatening players.
Sports gambling, it appears, has ripped open a Pandora’s box.
Anger from losing bettors is growing, but they may only be the canary in a coal mine. Celebrity players are always at risk for stalkers, but gamblers with a grudge are more volatile, if not dangerous.
The recent high-profile gambling misadventures of baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani’s personal interpreter and confidant, Ippei Mizuhara, demonstrate how addictions, money and desperation can spiral far out of control. The interpreter lost big, pleaded guilty to stealing $17 million from Ohtani and could draw a prison sentence of up to 33 years. He allegedly placed a staggering 19,000 bets over two years.
Fans have long expressed their disappointment with blown saves, errors, strikeouts and brutal miscues. But the anger intensifies when a player costs them a lot of money.
Aggrieved gambling fans are quicker to vent their rage. And those fans can now bet online on a host of outcomes not only at home but in real time at the games, too. This puts more angry losers into close proximity with the players they blame. The athletes are already reporting death threats to themselves and their family. Sometimes they are followed home, stalked, threatened and intimidated.
Drinking, gambling and losing are a combustible formula. With generally increasing societal anger expressed as road rage, verbal assaults in parks and stores, and even impulsive shootings, the risk to players could grow.
In the early days, underpaid players were susceptible to bribes from bookies and high rollers. With athletes earning exponentially greater money, the lesser-paid game officials became potential targets to rig games. Risks for such scenarios have diminished. The sports gaming industry went national and became corporate, and gambling became institutionalized. The corporations rake in massive profits just by managing that $119 billion and whatever it grows into for the foreseeable future.
Addiction and inexperience doom gamblers
Impulsive amateur gamblers are susceptible to mistakes. Gambling is an attractive vice that can feed the gambler’s ego and sometimes line their pockets. It can be addictive, too, by literally stimulating the brain’s reward system with jolts of dopamine. Inexperienced betters are especially vulnerable to the “gambler’s fallacy,” the common perception that past betting events will influence future ones, which usually gets them into deeper trouble.
Sports do experience a number of random events, hence the “game of inches” adage, but they are not purely random like an arbitrary deck of cards. Sporting events begin with athletic skills that are used to match or defy the odds to win games. Amateur gamblers are susceptible to volatile highs, lows and especially tough losses. They are also vulnerable to a condition called apophenia, where one sees suspicious patterns and perhaps even conspiracies. Players strike out all the time, but when money is riding on it, paranoid conclusions can be made. In short, some losers get mad and blame others.
The sports industry has historically been wary about the risks of gambling, but it also welcomes the added interest, revenue and excitement that today’s gambling can bring. Managing perceptions is why the deceased Black Sox players like “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and the discredited Pete Rose will not likely be embraced soon. And it is why the power hitters from baseball’s steroid era are now largely ostracized.
Already this year, Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano became the first active player in 100 years to receive a lifetime ban by Major League Baseball for betting on games. He allegedly placed 387 bets on baseball last season, including Pirates games when he was with that team. Before that, Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon lost his job in a gambling scandal. The NCAA said he leaked inside information to a gambler in 2023.
The growing combination of increased sports betting, anger and greed is a lit fuse waiting to blow. If it does, the fragile foundation of public acceptance and trust could collapse until sports leagues and the betting industry find a better way to manage the sports gambling windfall.
Eldon Ham is a member of the faculty at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports, law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.
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