Tonko is the rare lawmaker in Washington DC with an appetite to take on the sports betting boom, introducing the SAFE Bet Act with US senator Richard Blumentha in September, which aims to create consumer protections around mobile sports gambling and curb advertising.
While most people can limit gambling to a bit of occasional fun, medical journal the Lancet published a paper in November finding that 16.3% of adolescents worldwide who bet on sports developed a gambling addiction.
The answer is simple: because the mushrooming sports betting industry has converted an advertising blitz – pegged at more than a billion dollars a year from 2021 through 2023 by the American Gaming Association – into a highly effective machine for drawing and keeping customers, particularly young men.
As the biggest event on the US sports calendar – the Super Bowl – approaches, how did we get to a place where sports have been reduced to a kind of raw material to be refined and packaged into the real product: the no-sweat, profit-boosted, five-leg, in-game parlay bonus bet?.
When the US supreme court in 2018 gave the green light to states to allow for mobile sports gambling, they did that without consideration of the negative impacts that could be associated with it.”.
