The Sports Betting Industry Thinks You're a Loser
by Colin McGowan
What will we tolerate in pursuit of the feeling sports provide? We put up with all the advertising: televised games have felt, for quite a while now, as if they take place within the fictional universe of a never-ending insurance commercial. There are corporate logos on the jerseys, in the field of play, dominating the in-stadia video board real estate. Where a logo can’t physically fit in, computers project a simulated one onto the TV broadcast. Three-pointers and home runs are sponsored by banks and website hosting services; players are pitching you shampoo and regrettable lunchtime decisions. There is no way around this, no extra-pricey ticket or premium broadcast option that can elevate you to the status of a plain spectator, someone with a pure interest in the game. The leagues that own the action insist that you are an effervescent stream of consumer data, you are a wallet with legs. We have the power only to disagree. Squinting through the miasma, we take in something close to god.
No one would pay hundreds of dollars and endure the carnival-meets-corporate-retreat atmosphere of an NBA game if Steph Curry wasn’t there, pouring in jumpers from just past halfcourt. That is the real and beautiful thing that sports team owners, whose wealth mostly originated in various business and financial sectors, but who are all leading lights in what you might call the cynicism industry, are literally invested in. This is the sublimity that you, a celebrated innovator in the predatory mortgage space or maybe just some rich guy’s kid, are exploiting. It makes all your sell-offs and shakedowns possible.
Whether you care about sports or not, you’re aware that the folks who own and operate big companies are down on the concept of functioning products, generally. Quality represents squandered revenues. The structural integrity of a plane is secondary to maximizing shareholder returns; a web search doesn't need to surface good information, it exists to persuade advertisers to buy the top spots on every query.
Theoretically, this myopic profit-seeking has limits. It makes sense that investors and business leaders would want to ensure they don’t lose so many competent workers, or cheap out on materials such that their goods suffer a terminal decline. They might remove a few olives from the jar and keep charging the same price; presumably, though, they'd like to maintain a level of expertise re: the cultivation and packing of olives. But this doesn't seem to be true. Major League Baseball's 2024 jerseys are basically hosiery with iron-on decals, produced in a partnership between Fanatics, a sports apparel manufacturer with a track record of atrocious quality control, and Nike, which decided to replace tailoring with algorithmic mass approximation. To be fair, Fanatics doesn’t see making uniforms that safely obscure the wearer’s genitals as their primary business. When the company fired more than a hundred people this past February, they explained the move as part of their “[evolution] from a merchandise company into a global digital sports platform.”
Fanatics can yada-yada what would seem to be load-bearing aspects of its plan for world domination because the junk they’re selling features Dodgers and Yankees and Red Sox logos. Lots of people really like these teams, and will wear their branded hats and jackets and replica jerseys pretty much independent of build quality. They have suffered greater indignities. (For instance, there was a six-year period where about half the city of Los Angeles couldn’t watch Dodgers games on TV.)
Fans’ enduring allegiance means it’s almost impossible to fuck up doing business in and around America's major sports. The very worst owners in the game, tight-fisted jerks loathed by entire regions, routinely sell their franchises at a profit of hundreds of millions of dollars. It doesn't matter if they deduct lunches from their players’ salaries, degrade them in the locker room, or cheap out on paying them. The team can suck; the workplace can be a nightmare. State Farm still wants to puts its name near wherever Steph Curry is taking jumpers. The asset will appreciate.
The leagues have recently fully embraced sports betting, which has been great for the bottom line and loosed a new avalanche of ads—during games, but also on and around any sports-flavored TV show, podcast, press article, or social media channel—imploring you to download the BetCash app and sign up using promo code WIFELEFTME. Commentators openly discuss betting lines on broadcasts, and the NBA has even rolled out a service that lets you bet on games using their streaming app. All of this is tacky and annoying, and it puts you in much closer proximity to hot-breathed casino creatures than you’d like to be, but it becomes alarming when you consider that many athletes, also, have betting apps on their phones, and that they’re getting shouted at by fans in the stands with money on the line. Each league has policies aimed at keeping players from betting on any games they’re involved in or might have inside information about, but they inspire oddly specific questions—athletes can’t bet while on the clock, but when is somebody traveling to an away game “at work,” exactly?—so the rules are poorly understood by the players themselves.
One prominent wide receiver has already served a year-long suspension for gambling on NFL games. A relative nobody in the NBA is currently being investigated for some strange betting activity related to his game-to-game performances. But that stuff pales in comparison to the mess Shohei Ohtani, the best player in baseball, is currently wrapped up in. The story goes that his translator accrued about $4.5 million in losses betting on NFL, NBA, and college football games. Ohtani then gave him money to cover his debts. Or wait, no, the translator stole money from Ohtani to cover the debts. Everyone has been conspicuously clear about one thing: Ohtani was not betting. Which raises a red flag or two. The Dodgers have fired the translator, and MLB has launched an investigation. It’s hard to believe they'll find anything they're not looking for. This is an outfit that did everything it could to avoid learning about widespread steroid use in the ’80s, ’90s, and early aughts, and it was not literally in business with the pharma labs that were juicing up Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire.
Other sports gambling scandals simmer well outside the general public’s notice. I was watching Temple face UAB in the American Athletic Conference men's basketball championship a few weeks ago and learned that, the previous time the two teams had played, a ton of last-minute money had been placed on UAB to win comfortably. Temple proceeded to lose by 28. Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that it’s possible a good number of college athletes, the vast majority of whom are not millionaires like the pros, have been asked to shave points.
This arrangement between the leagues and the gambling companies possesses the seediness and fraught moral dimensions of a lap dance. Betting is now everywhere around sports, but you are asked to believe that it is emphatically not affecting the outcome of games. Or it’s affecting very few games. Anyway, not the one you're watching. Except that’s not how sports work, really. The competition is legitimate or it’s not. You need to be able to trust these incredible athletes, who spur each other's genius through mutual exertion, are doing their best to win. Without that, all achievements are void and the spectacle dissolves into farce.
The greedy folks in charge seem content, resting at the edge of this catastrophe. If they were to ruin professional baseball or basketball, it’s hard to believe they would care all that much. Probably they would be happy to let it shuffle along in a zombified state, selling its expired essence and finally its corpse, like many other precious things they’ve bought, gutted, and discarded. They might mourn the asset, for about a minute. It would then be up to the rest of us to commemorate what had been lost. The feelings of transcendence and whatnot.
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