25
votes
ESPN deal with Penn Entertainment means that watching sports will likely include watching a lot more ads for gambling
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- Title
- ESPN Is About To Get Much More Annoying | Defector
- Published
- Aug 9 2023
- Word count
- 650 words
Gambling is the pandora's box unleashed by the internet.
For a variety of reasons a lot of countries have made gambling some level of illegal, and there's always been some sort of black/grey/exception market around this, but limited.
And then the internet/tech boom happened and suddenly everyone was gambling but not quite or not in their jurisdiction and alllll those elected officials/dictators/whatever saw juuuust how much money you can rip from people that they weren't already getting and decided to be more lax on the laws.
I'm pretty big on "at some point adults are allowed to be stupid or to choose their entertainment", but what bothers me about all of this is just how much of it conveniently targets children "by accident" or skirts gambling laws to extract funds from children. I feel like we've just passed a mortality barrier there (somewhat like standards/opinion on porn) but rather than being more progressive it's just more predatory.
We've always known that gambling could extract a ton of money from people, and that children most of all are going to be easy prey for it, but it really seems that most countries just don't care anymore, and would rather squeeze out every last dime.
It really is insane to have watched it go from cracking down on online poker to overtaking the advertisement space of sports
It’s especially frustrating feeling like there needs to be done more about children and gambling laws in the US (eg loot boxes and card packs in video games), but instead they’ve made it more lax here.
I kind of want to push back against the attitude of letting adults do what they want. Gambling is an addiction, and while in the US that general attitude is to let people "make bad decisions," addiction should not be seen as a moral failure. Adults aren't any less deserving of compassion and care than kids.
Something you and other commenters have rightly pointed out, though, is that online gambling targets kids. A big contributor to this, as well, is gaming. FIFA, Overwatch, Genshin, and all their contemporaries that participate in gambling as a business model serve not only to act as the gateway drug for gambling, but also to normalize it. With video game microtransactions and sports betting, they've sort of worked their way into a different part of the cultural conscious than traditional gambling. They're seen as "just games" in a way that casino games aren't. And ultimately, this feeds back into my first point, in that making it difficult to even recognize it as gambling makes it all the more difficult to treat it as an addiction and provide the requisite support.
I agree? I just don't think you can force adults to seek treatment and their choices are valid (and I think there is a large % that can enjoy such things responsibly). Further the cost to society for, "vice squads" or whatever you want to call it often winds up being far worse than the vice's in the first place.
I hold roughly the same view on all potentially dangerous/damaging/addictive actives/substances. That said, society in my eyes does benefit by giving the young a chance to develop in a somewhat protected environment/class, so i'm all for dropping the hammer on all of this stuff and making it way way harder to put this shit in front of kids.
I'm curious when you were last in the US, because for a handful of years now the NFL has been dominated by gambling ads. Every commercial break has at least one, if not two or three, ads for various betting apps. ESPN spends a chunk of every hour talking about betting lines. Peyton and Eli Manning are in commercials for Caesar's. Multiple NFL players have been suspended over the last two years due to gambling, and I honestly can't remember when that had last happened.
It's honestly shocking how much there is. If Australia is worse than it is here then I am not looking forward to where this is heading.
I don't know if this is true of every team, but Mets games now have several gambling spots per game embedded in the broadcast, with the sideline reporter reading updates to the game's betting odds every couple of innings. It's really obnoxious. I don't know if they are running commercials too because I use pirated streams that don't have the commercials, but I wouldn't be surprised if the are.
They've also loosened online betting laws in the US in the last two or so years. It's definitely noticeable, unfortunately.
What I find especially revolting is when players take endorsement deals with sports books. Two of the NHL's premier players (Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews) have deals with sports books. You'll see them promoting gambling at least once every commercial break during games that they're playing in.
You can even watch Wayne Gretzky, who almost certainly bet on NHL games through his wife while he was a player, endorse sports betting.
While I generally don’t like how gambling advertising is so pervasive, I have to say that I do actually like seeing the odds for fighters in the UFC being displayed. I don’t always know much (or anything) about new fighters, especially in the prelims, and I think it improves my experience to have a sense of who is favoured going into the match. I guess I like knowing if the underdog is outperforming expectations.