Is betting on sports good or bad for sports?

Americans legally bet an estimated $3.1 billion on men’s and women’s NCAA tournament games this past March, up $400 million from the year before.

And while that’s a big number, it’s a fraction of the nearly $150 billion the American Gaming Association estimates people wagered in total on sports in 2024.

Super Bowl LIX this past February was the online sportsbook BetMGM’s single-biggest betting event ever, according to the New York Post. DraftKings, another sportsbook, reported it wrote more than 12 million bets on the big game across its 2.5 million active users.

Gambling on both professional and college sports has exploded since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban in 2018. At least 38 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico now allow commercial sports betting in some form.

Sports betting has become embedded in American culture. Sportsbooks are now everywhere, from nonstop advertising to social media feeds to in-game commentary. It has gone from the fringes of society to mainstream.

But it also raises a number of questions. Among them: Is it good or bad for society? Is it good or bad for sports?

Morning Consult posed those questions in a new nationwide poll for the Deseret News and the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics.

The results find Americans somewhat indifferent about the impact sports betting has on society and sports.

The good, the bad and the middle

When asked, “Do you think legal betting on professional and collegiate sports is a good or a bad thing for society?”, 45% say it’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Less than a third, 30%, say it’s a bad thing, while 14% say it’s a good thing. Another 12% don’t know.

When asked, “Do you think legal betting on professional and collegiate sports is a good or a bad thing for sports?”, 40% say it’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Again, less than a third, 31%, say it’s a bad thing, while 18% say it’s a good thing. Another 12% don’t know.

Morning Consult conducted the poll of 2,225 U.S. adults Nov. 7-13. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

“I just feel like this all happened so quickly for people that they didn’t necessarily have a chance to digest what the stakes were, what the dangers were,” said journalist Danny Funt, who chronicled the rise of American sports gambling in a new book titled “Everybody Loses” due out in January.

“It happened so quickly that the gambling industry and their business partners had such a powerful lobby and public platform to assure people that this was, if not neutral, actually a good thing for sports and society.”

Funt said evidence of rising gambling addiction rates and dangers to public health along personal finance issues such as higher bankruptcy rates, less savings and college students tapping into their tuition fund is trickling in.

“All of these studies and research projects are creating a mountain of bad news,” he said. “I would expect those figures (in the poll) to continue to skew toward more concern than optimism as time passes.”

Sports betting scandals

The new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute survey came just after a gambling scandal rocked the NBA and as news broke of another one in Major League Baseball. Both call into question the integrity of American sports.

In the past few weeks, more than 50 people, including past and current NBA and MLB players and mobsters, were indicted in four separate federal and state sports gambling cases.

A case federal agents dubbed “Operation Nothing But Bet” alleges Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and five others used nonpublic injury and lineup information to place fraudulent bets on NBA games worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In a case called “Operation Royal Flush,” Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and 30 others, including members of organized crime, were charged in schemes to rig illegal poker games.

In the baseball case, two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, one a three-time All-Star, allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in bribes to help gamblers in their native Dominican Republic win at least $460,000 on bets placed on the speed and outcome of their pitches.

On Thursday, the New Jersey attorney general charged 14 people for their alleged roles in a multimillion-dollar illegal sports betting ring that involved college athletes and had links to organized crime.

Funt said those cases didn’t surprise those plugged into what’s going on in sports gambling, and could be the tip of the iceberg.

“I just think the argument that it’s somehow good for sports by making it easier to police and prosecute gambling-related corruption is just such a flimsy, downright disingenuous argument to me. As that sort of bad news keeps coming I don’t see how anyone could hold that belief seriously,” he said.

“In fact, there’s so many more ways to manipulate games no matter what you’re able to monitor, the risk of corruption is, as I see it, undeniably greater.”

Breaking down the survey results

The Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll generally found more younger people and men see betting as a good thing than older people and women, reaching as high as 27% among the 18-34 crowd. That age group, Funt said, is undoubtedly the target audience of sports betting companies.

Baby boomers are less tolerant of gambling on sports than other generations. Half say it’s bad for society and 46% say it’s bad for sports. On the flip side, fewer than 2 in 10 GenZers see sports betting as bad for either.

Broken down by political persuasion, slightly more Republicans than Democrats say it’s good for society. Slightly more Republicans also say it’s bad. More Democrats than Republicans, though, said it’s neither a bad thing nor a good thing.

Democrats and Republicans were about the same as to whether sports betting is good for sports. But 35% of Republicans say it’s bad compared to 30% of Democrats. More Democrats than Republicans say sports betting is neither a good thing nor a bad thing for sports.

Looking at income levels, 26% of people making under $50,000 a year say sports betting is bad for society compared to 39% of those earning more than $100,000 annually. The numbers were nearly identical about whether it’s bad for sports.

The American sports betting industry posted record revenue of $13.71 billion in 2024, up from a record $11.04 billion the year before, according to the American Gaming Association.

“Last year saw brick-and-mortar revenue growth slow, while online gaming and sports betting continued to grow,” AGA vice president of research David Forman said, per ESPN. “These past few years have reshaped the industry, and the revenue pie, while it’s much bigger, looks very different than it used to. That’s increasingly driven by new online gaming options available to more people than ever before.”

There ought to be a law

On the heels of the NBA gambling scandal, Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee demanded answers in a letter to commissioner Adam Silver.

“This is a matter of Congressional concern,” Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., wrote. “The integrity of NBA games must be trustworthy and free from the influence of organized crime or gambling-related activity. Sports betting scandals like this one may lead the American public to assume that all sports are corrupt.”

In Washington, D.C., last week, two Democratic lawmakers called for congressional action to regulate sports betting and threw their support behind a new advocacy group called Family and Friends of Gamblers. They along with public health experts and families say a lack of federal regulation has fueled gambling addiction and eroded public trust in professional sports.

“It’s a silent plague,” said Declan Hill, a University of New Haven professor who studies corruption in sports.

Hill, per the Capital News Service, recounted previous international cases of match-fixing and organized-crime pressure on athletes. But he said the addiction doesn’t stop with athletes and coaches.

“It hurts the people. It hurts their friends. It hurts their families. It destroys the trust,” Hill said.

Calling problem sports gambling a public health crisis, Rep. Paul Tonko, D-N.Y., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., introduced the SAFE Bet Act just before March Madness this year. The bill bans sportsbook advertising during live sporting events, the use of artificial intelligence to track players’ gambling habits and prop bets on college and amateur athletes.

A University of California San Diego Qualcomm Institute and School of Medicine study published in JAMA Internal Medicine earlier this year found a dramatic increase in sports betting and those seeking help for gambling addiction since states started legalizing gambling in 2018, per UC San Diego Today.

“Now, sportsbooks have expanded from a single state to 38 states, with hundreds of billions of wagers, mostly online, coinciding with record-breaking demand for help with gambling addiction as millions seek help,” said the study’s senior author John W. Ayers, vice chief of innovation in the Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health, deputy director of informatics at UC San Diego Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute and Qualcomm Institute scientist.

According to the AGA, the industry spends half a billion dollars a year on responsible gaming initiatives that include support for independent academic research, distribution of educational campaigns and funding for problem gambling services. The organization contends the legal sports betting market brings needed tax revenue to states and communities while protecting consumers from the illegal market.

A public apology

Massachusetts state Sen. John Keenan this week publicly apologized for voting in favor of sports betting in his state, per Legal Sports Report.

“When I voted to legalize sports betting I never thought it would become what it is,” he said. “We unleashed an industry that now promotes betting on anything and everything imaginable and unimaginable all over the world, 24 hours a day, every single day.”

Keenan, a Democrat, is proposing legislation that would end betting advertisements during televised sports events and prop bets and in-play bets.

“I deeply regret my vote and I want to publicly apologize to those who have lost the opportunity to sit and watch a game just for the enjoyment of the game,” he said. “I want to apologize to those who find themselves in the dark spaces of betting addiction and to those working through recovery, and to their families and friends. I want to apologize to those who have lost loved ones to suicide because of gambling issues.”