A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Tonight, sports fans will gather to watch the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship between the Indiana Hoosiers and the Miami Hurricanes. And it's safe to say that some will even wager some bucks, perhaps lots of bucks, on the game. A 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to legalize sports betting in the United States, and since then, the industry has pretty much grown to be ubiquitous in sports.
Journalist Danny Funt has been covering this for outlets such as The Washington Post and The New Yorker. His new book is "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise Of American Sports Gambling." And I wanted to hear more about it. So we started our conversation by talking about the professional sports leagues who were once opposed to gaming and are now among the industry's chief champions.
DANNY FUNT: What I found out was the gambling industry commissioned studies from Nielsen, the company that measures TV audiences and other media consumption. Over time, they commissioned more than $1 million worth of studies to show just how rabid gamblers are at not only watching sports but just consuming everything they can about sports, and how much money that could generate for the leagues. In the case of the NFL, the most popular sport to bet on, that Nielsen analysis found that every year, the league would stand to make about $2.3 billion from legalization of sports betting. And despite a century of saying this was an existential threat to sports, the money just proved too good to pass up.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. Now, OK, if we were to break down the economy of sports, the things that create revenue in sports - tickets, merchandise, food, anything else - how much does gaming figure into that pie?
FUNT: In a direct sense, as far as all these sponsorships you hear about or ads on the court or in the bleachers or wherever, think that's a relatively marginal amount. What does move the needle is what it does for TV viewership, which is the main moneymaker for the leagues. Nielsen found after a fairly robust survey that gamblers watch more than twice as many games as conventional fans.
MARTÍNEZ: So, Danny, explain live betting because I think for most people that maybe have placed a bet once or twice in their life, maybe with a friend, it's this team will beat this team by X amount of points. And that's where it ends. But what do you mean by live betting during the game?
FUNT: The idea that you can bet by the second on something every minute of the day is a true game changer. And the industry has perfected carving up games into thousands of betting opportunities. The leagues, by the way, have made a fortune selling live data that enables that sort of minute-by-minute, in-game betting.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. And so this live betting in games leads to prop bets. So explain the concept of prop bets and how that can get lots of people, including the players, into trouble.
FUNT: Prop is short for proposition. And the idea is beyond who wins or loses. Like, will the quarterback throw for three touchdowns? Will the center fielder hit a home run? On and on. I spoke with a former executive at DraftKings who said they never imagined that prop betting would amount to more than half of their revenue and that for a lot of their younger customers, that's all they bet on. But also, if you're betting on an individual's performance, as you were alluding to, there's so many opportunities nowadays for a player, a coach, a referee to fix the outcome of a prop. And as we're finding, the leagues just can't possibly police that. It's just too much ground to cover.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, trying to get a team to win or lose is more than just one player. But, I mean, yeah, athletes do have a lot of control over particular prop bets. The Cleveland Guardians had a couple of pitchers this past baseball season who are now federally indicted for a scheme of sharing information on the pitches they would throw with gamblers.
FUNT: It's hard to believe that literally, will the next pitch be a ball or a strike or will it be above or below a certain speed is something you can not just bet on, but bet a lot of money on.
MARTÍNEZ: Danny, tell us about the VIP services people who use the betting service can access and everything that goes with it.
FUNT: This had to be the most shocking chapter. I had no idea how huge a piece of the business VIPs are. Just 2% or 3% of customers make up 60% or 70% of sportsbook revenue, I learned. These are people who are betting tens of thousands of dollars on a weekly or monthly basis at minimum, sometimes much, much more than that. And because they're so valuable, sportsbooks lavish them with the most unbelievable perks imaginable. Throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, playing pickup on an NBA court, meeting retired legends in a suite during the game, you name it. They'll do anything they can to keep those customers loyal as long as they keep losing at these staggering rates. I found as soon as they pull back a little bit or take a break, all of those perks go away.
MARTÍNEZ: How much do these companies actually care that maybe a lot of their customers are going through gambling addictions?
FUNT: One person who's very high up at one of the top sportsbooks told me that anything beyond the lowest common denominator when it comes to player protections, customer protections is seen as, as they put it, a competitive disadvantage. A lot of times when it comes to those VIP customers, they think, if we intervene to cut them off or ask them - hey, is your betting out of control? - they're just going to go to one of our rivals. So all we're going to do is lose market share.
MARTÍNEZ: You know, when I used to watch and listen to gambling advice shows, the hosts were always these old guys that had been around a long time. But what I'm seeing lately, Danny, is teenagers on TikTok, on social media giving gambling advice. I mean, is that where this is going?
FUNT: Absolutely. I spoke with one of the foremost experts in youth gambling problems, a man named Jeffrey Derevensky. And one thing he pointed out is that this is a progressive disorder. And so we don't really know what we're in for. But he was seeing so many people develop gambling problems who get started with sports betting at a young age, partly because it's presented to the public as this innocent, harmless thing that everyone does nowadays if they watch sports. And he just can't imagine where this is all heading and the addiction problem that the country is going to have to reconcile in the coming years.
MARTÍNEZ: Danny Funt. His new book is "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise Of American Sports Gambling." Danny, thanks a lot.
FUNT: My pleasure. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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