I’ve been a huge sports fan my whole life.Whether watching, playing or experiencing them through video games, I’ve always been surrounded by sports. I fell in love with soccer first, then basketball. Now that I’m older, my favorite thing in the world is to turn on RedZone, sit on my couch and spend the next seven hours parked there watching football, only moving for the bathroom or fridge.
One thing I’m sure many otherfanshavenoticedover the past several seasons is the steady integration of gambling companies and advertisements into sports coverage.
Sports betting used to be taboo, or at least something that required a trip to Las Vegas or a connection to a bookie. It was not sitting in the average fan’s pocket. Since the Supreme Court opened the door for states to legalize it in 2018, 39 states and Washington, D.C., have done so. According toSimilarwebdatareported by Time, average monthly users of the most popular betting apps increased 600 percent from January 2021 to September 2023, reaching 16.3 million.
The leagues and broadcasters could smell blood in the water and moved quickly to claim their share.
The NFL’s deal with Caesars, DraftKings and FanDuel is estimated to be worth a combined $1 billion over five years. The financial terms of the NBA’s partnerships with DraftKings and FanDuel are undisclosed but can safely be assumed to be quite lucrative as well. ESPN went even further, agreeing to a $1.5 billion deal over 10 years with Penn Entertainment to launchESPNBet.Thepartnership endedinDecember 2025, and ESPN quickly moved to DraftKings, the biggest fish in the pond, as its official sportsbook and odds provider.
When even ESPN, the company that has defined sports media for decades, decides it needs its own betting platform, gambling stops feeling like something broadcasters are merely folding into the product for fun. It starts to feel like the product itself. It’s almost impossible to turn on a pregame show without seeing multiple segments on the spread and how the odds are changing. Leagues and broadcasters manipulate their audiences by using fans’ favorite former players to advertise same-game parlays, player props and deposit deals, making wagering feel safe and inseparable from watching the game. It’s gotten so bad that announcers frequently reference how scores affect spreads or totals.
Treating gambling like just another harmless sponsor category is absurd. Sure, a 15-second mention of the pregame spread could be interesting and probably doesn’t do much harm. Dedicating half an hour to gambling content before every prime-time matchup is completely different, and it takes away from the spectacle of the sport itself.
According to the American Gaming Association, Americans legally wagered nearly $167 billion on sports in 2025, while sportsbooks kept a record $16.96 billion. Sports betting revenue increased nearly 23 percent from the previous year.
What used to be a demonstration of sportsmanship and competition now feels like a casino floor, with fans less invested in who wins than whether a player gets one more rebound or scores one more touchdown, all while the leagues and broadcasters supplying the product are fully enabling it.
They harshly punish insider gambling, citing threats to public trust, but when those same leagues are paid to encourage fans to gamble, apparently there’s no issue.
Everyone is aware gambling can cause addiction, debt and ruined relationships. Yet the same institutions that constantly show us how much they supposedly care about fans through mental health campaigns, youth programs, community outreach and inclusion initiatives turn around and help normalize one of the most common and debilitating addictions in the country.
Leagues do not have to pretend gambling does not exist, but every message about caring for the fans rings a lot more hollow when it is followed by an ad telling them to place a bet.