DraftKings — just one of three sports betting companies, along with FanDuel and Fanatics, partnering with the NFL for the 2026 season — has offered such past digital advertising enticements as this: “The NFL is back! Get a free shot at the $1 MILLION TOP PRIZE.”
In the same ad, in lettering roughly one-quarter the size: “GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER.”
It would appear the United States indeed has a problem — at least in the 39 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized sports gambling.
According to an Epic Research study released in late June, the quarterly rate of diagnosed gambling disorder among residents of these states rose from 3.0 per 100,000 patients in the first quarter of 2018, the year the Supreme Court granted individual states the right to legalize sports gambling, to 4.8 per 100,000 in Q1 2026. Researchers credit aggressive marketing and app ubiquity for the 60% increase.
Given the risks to their respective residents, why do states opt to legalize in the first place?
“There’s only one answer to a question like that. The answer is money,” says Jodi Balsam, professor of clinical law at New York’s Brooklyn Law School, where she serves as director of the BLS Sports Law Clinic. “The states are taking a vig. The states are earning licensing fees from the sports book, tax revenue from the profits, and all sorts of other fees and levies on the industry. It has been a huge windfall for state treasuries.”
The American Gaming Association reported $166.94 billion was legally wagered on all U.S. sports in 2025. That represented 11% more money bet than the year before. Revenue rose by 22.8% to $16.96 billion, and state-regulated sportsbooks generated $3.71 billion in taxes, an increase of 32.4% year over year.
For a dozen years, “before gambling became a national phenomenon,” Balsam served the NFL as counsel for operations and litigation, as well as its compliance officer focused on dispute resolution, including matters of league integrity. She cites integrity — the public’s trust in the validity of game outcomes — as the reason the NFL and other professional leagues initially lobbied against gambling legalization and then, once the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act after only 26 years as federal law in 2018, slow-rolled their affiliation with sportsbooks. Even the latest Super Bowl set a limit of six sportsbook advertisements during its broadcast on NBC in February.
But the leagues now see gambling as a driver of fan interest, ratings and, yes, revenue — never mind that public attention is starting to shift to gambling’s adverse impacts on society.
“This is the latest front-burner issue in the world of sports gambling — that addictive behaviors, problem gamblers, are starting to get the attention they deserve — and there have been private industry attempts to anticipate and address that, but they haven’t been that effective,” Balsam says. “So, you now start seeing proposals in both state legislatures and Congress to regulate gambling advertising and promotional materials in the way that other vice products, such as cigarettes or alcohol, have been regulated.”
For its part, the AGA offers a Responsible Marketing Code for Sports Wagering, which “establishes guidelines for the advertising and promotion of sports betting.” Updated in March 2023, the code goes beyond the advertising regulations applicable to sports betting within legal states to include self-imposed restrictions on target audiences, outlets and materials branding. The first two of six points of emphasis in the AGA Code address respecting the legal age for sports wagering (it’s 21) and limiting college and university advertising.
“These are hortatory,” Balsam cautions. “They’re not compulsory. And good citizens in the world of gambling — casino, online poker, sports gambling — claim to subscribe to them to protect against the harms and societal ills that gambling can cause.”
This includes professional leagues, all of which advocate for this sort of self-regulation, according to Balsam. “Are they adhering to the spirit of those guidelines? Maybe they adhere to the letter of those guidelines, but it’s concerning that their promotional materials are so pervasive and sometimes deceptive.”
Hitting the books
It’s no secret that men — young men, in particular — gravitate toward sports gambling more than other demographics, but some may find the hard numbers surprising, if not alarming.
In May 2023, the NCAA released a study commissioned by Charlie Baker only weeks after his arrival as association president in December 2022. It found that among the 3,527 18- to 22-year-olds surveyed, 58% had engaged in at least one sports betting activity. Moreover, 67% — fully two-thirds — of students who resided on college campuses tended to bet on sports with some frequency, 41% of collegiate student bettors had bet on their own school, and 35% had used a student bookmaker.
“One thing that we have uncovered over the last few years is that the risk for gambling addiction is really transitioning into young men,” says Cole Wogoman, director of policy and partnerships at the nonprofit National Council on Problem Gambling in Washington, D.C. “That’s not to say there aren’t young women with gambling problems, but we know that the risk is higher for young men. Sports, by their nature, tend to appeal to young men, and so I think that’s part of it. Their brain is not fully developed to understand risks and probabilities, and that’s another reason they’re at higher risk.”
Relative to alcohol or tobacco, there is scant research on gambling addiction, Wogoman admits, but he subscribes to the idea that education level may serve as a predictor. “Oftentimes, it’s folks who don’t have much education, maybe lower income, who are going to gamble,” he says. “But when we look at sports, we’re finding it is oftentimes young men who have education and maybe do earn a decent living, and we’re not really sure why that is. I think one theory is people who go to college end up enjoying college sports. They get into it and think that they can outsmart the sportsbook. But we’re not really sure.”
Increasingly clear are potential consequences of such behavior. Inc. reported in August that a survey conducted by digital investment advisor Betterment found that of the roughly 250 individuals representing Gen Z (younger than 30) in its larger pool of survey participants, more than half (52%) said they redirected money originally intended for investing toward sports betting within the past year. More than a quarter (26%) now consider sports betting a deliberate part of their long-term financial strategy.
This mindset is likely years in the making.
“From the perspective of a social observer, or a legislator, or anyone concerned with the wellbeing of our youth, the most pressing concern is that we’ve now sort of corrupted youth interaction with sports,” Balsam says. “Sports is not only viewed as an opportunity to become more physically healthy and build character and learn values such as teamwork. It’s also to make money, and not make money by participating necessarily in a sport, but by gambling on its outcomes.”
Targeted audience
The more gamblers among their peers, the greater the risk of exposure to corruption and even physical threats of violence to collegiate athletes themselves (something the NCAA’s Baker has identified as a “particularly urgent” issue). More than 1,000 Division I players suit up for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament each year. Between $3.3 billion and $4 billion was legally wagered on March Madness in 2026, according to estimates of the AGA and other tracking firms.
In addition to its survey of college-age individuals, the NCAA has since 2004 surveyed student-athletes every four years regarding their own gambling attitudes and activity. Analysis of data compiled from five surveys representing more than 100,000 athletes (no survey was conducted in 2020) and shared earlier this year by the National Institutes of Health found that overall gambling participation among college athletes has actually declined over time, with increasing proportions of non-gamblers and decreasing rates of social gambling among both men and women. However, the latest survey found that more male athletes reported gambling alone, 15% in 2024 compared to 6% in 2016, which raises concerns about undetected problem gambling. And while most bets involved low stakes, 5% of male athletes reported single-day losses of $500 or more in the 2024 survey, up from 2% in 2016.
The NCAA has entertained the thought of allowing athletes to bet on professional sports, but two-thirds of its Division I membership voted to maintain the association’s blanket ban on all gambling activity. This hard line was never more evident — or handy — than this past spring during the months-long legal saga surrounding the eligibility of quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who admitted to placing more than 9,000 wagers totaling at least $90,000 while enrolled at Indiana, Cincinnati and Texas Tech. His betting included 40 wagers involving Indiana football while he was a member of the team in 2022 and 2023.
Balsam remains skeptical of the suggestion that a positive side effect of the NIL movement — now in its sixth year — is that above-board athlete compensation would make athletes less vulnerable targets for fixers. The proliferation of proposition (“prop”) bets — wagers made on nearly every conceivable occurrence within games, from which team will score first to how many foul shots a certain player will convert — still leaves plenty of opportunity for corruption.
“Those bets often only require one player to manipulate their own performance and in a way that isn’t necessarily outcome determinative,” Balsam says. “The player, to the extent they have any loyalty to their teammates or commitment to the game, is rationalizing to themselves, ‘You know, it’s just me missing one foul shot. That won’t have any impact, right?’ It’s easier to disguise. The corruption risk is not that somebody’s going to purposely lose a game. It’s somebody’s going to adjust their performance to some degree to determine the outcome of a bet.”
Proposition and prediction
Established gambling practice since baseball’s earliest days in the 1800s, prop bets are now experiencing pushback in some states. And if limiting their proliferation wasn’t enough for state regulators to think about in 2026, the explosion of predictive markets poses a new challenge.
In this scenario, participants trade binary peer-to-peer contracts on the outcomes of real-world events (elections, for example), including (to an ever-increasing extent) sporting events, as opposed to placing wagers against a traditional sportsbook. Major players in the space such as Kalshi and Polymarket purport to deal in “event contracts — not wagers,” Balsam says, adding, “States are claiming that now that the event contract companies have moved into sports events, we should characterize that as sports gambling, and they should be subject to state regulation. That’s being litigated right now.”
Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection, for one, has issued cease-and-desist orders to nine companies, claiming they are “illegally operating prediction markets in the state.”
“They have embarked on a coordinated campaign to convince people that they are offering investments by using such terms as trading, financial strategy, market risk — falsely implying that wagers are akin to traditional savings or investment vehicles,” DCP commissioner Bryan Cafferelli stated during a Sept. 10 press conference held at the Fanatics Sportsbook inside Hartford’s PeoplesBank Arena. “In reality, they are indistinguishable from sports wagering, except they don’t have consumer protections.”
Prediction marketing is no less targeted or pervasive than traditional sports gambling ads. The day before Cafferelli’s press conference, Novig debuted a campaign featuring nearly naked 29-year-old “Euphoria” actress Sydney Sweeney pitching the company’s “Just Sports” prediction focus from behind strategically placed pieces of athletic gear.
According to the AGA, while traditional online sportsbook impressions dropped by nearly 14% in 2025, advertising for prediction markets skyrocketed, and 43% of digital sports betting ads seen by U.S. consumers during the first two months of 2026 did not comply with state gaming regulations because they were, in fact, deployed by prediction market operators.
It’s regulatory whack-a-mole, with public trust in the sports we watch constantly at stake. “Even if the leagues all succeeded in convincing every single one of the jurisdictions to eliminate prop bets or at least circumscribe them,” Balsam says, “you’d still have Polymarket and Kalshi out there offering so-called event contracts on those sports events outcomes.”
Problem-solving progress
If trying to put at least part of the sports betting horse back in the barn sounds daunting, it pays to remember that it’s ultimately in the interest of society’s out-of-control gamblers.
“People for the longest time viewed gambling addiction as a willpower issue, not a true addiction, and it took a lot of science in the ’80s and ’90s to disprove that,” Wogoman says. “Now [as of 2013], gambling addiction is officially recognized in DSM-5 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition] alongside other behavioral addictions. It’s not that someone doesn’t want to stop betting, it’s that they actually can’t. That was a big breakthrough, and we’re using that now with this sports betting boom to get people talking about it and get rid of the stigma. I think we’re making a lot of progress.”
A hurdle remains in the form of funding for ongoing research. “Unlike alcohol and tobacco, there is not a penny of federal money that goes toward gambling addiction research, gambling addiction treatment, or prevention,” according to Wogoman.
Compare that to the one cent he says the government collects for every $4 gambled on sports, and the frustration over federal inaction is understandable. “Because sports betting used to only be legal in Nevada, it didn’t really bring in very much money. Nobody cared,” says Wogoman. “Now, all of a sudden, it’s bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
Federal legislation currently in committee seeks a percentage of that action. H.R. 7875, the Providing Opportunities for Individuals in Need of Treatment and Support (POINTS) Act of 2026, represents the first bipartisan bill proposing federal funding to address gambling addiction in more than a decade. The law would divert a full third of the government’s gambling revenue stream to states and tribes for treatment and prevention. Says Wogoman, “Basically, this would be the first real sustainable funding ever.”
“Everyone can do more,” he continues. “We always say that anybody who makes money from legalized gambling, including the government making tax money from it, has an obligation to send a portion of that money back to prevention and treatment. Because you’re helping the problem expand, you need to help in having the things in place to rein it in.”
Will money ultimately be the answer in a marketing world filled with mixed messages? After all, including a gambling helpline in ads promoting million-dollar payouts may seem akin to printing Jenny Craig contact information on a box of Krispy Kremes.
“I think we would love to see more standalone ads that are either for responsible gambling or for problem gambling,” Wogoman says. “We think about responsible gambling, and what does that look like? Well, maybe you set a timer on the app for how long you can be on it. Maybe you set a limit on how much you can spend — after $100 a day, you get blocked from the app. There’s a whole bunch of tools like that that we ask companies to include on their apps and to make them the default, not just buried somewhere in the app. And the idea is that the user now has these safeguards in place to try to keep his play from getting out of hand.
“Those are really important, but they’re meant for you and me. They’re not meant for someone with a gambling problem, and it’s similar to telling someone to drink responsibly. If someone’s an alcoholic, that does nothing. It’s too late. It’s meant for the people who are not alcoholics to make sure that they stay on the right track. Problem gambling is when somebody has a gambling problem and they should not be gambling at all. We see, unfortunately, this conflation of these two very different things. Is anybody really seeing a gambling ad and then calling the number that’s in a small font at the bottom of the screen for five seconds?”
NCPG has its own helpline (1-800-MY-RESET) for problem gamblers, but the extent to which pro sports leagues have accepted NCPG’s expertise spans the spectrum, according to Wogoman. “The NFL, with our help, has done some responsible gambling ads during some of their games — Kurt Warner talking about, ‘Hey, make sure you set a budget and stick to it. Don’t chase your losses. Remember, this is entertainment. You’re not likely to strike it rich.’ ”
The in-your-face nature of modern-day sports gambling has at least brought the subject into the light. “It used to be that gambling really occurred in smoky back rooms or riverboat casinos, and it was very easy to hide,” Wogoman says. “Now, especially in the last 10 years, we see gambling commercials during every sporting event. We see our friends sitting on the couch doing it. We know our kids in college are exposed to it. We see the professional sports league scandals. It’s really hard to ignore.”
Balsam, who continues to make gambling a research focus, is paying particular attention to how other countries handle sports gambling. “There’s actually really interesting backlash against the ubiquity of sports gambling going on in countries that legalized it decades before it was legalized in most U.S. jurisdictions,” she says. “I’ve been following something called Reclaim the Game in Australia. It’s an awareness initiative intended to challenge the normalization of sports betting and advertising. It’s a sort of public-private partnership to try to reduce the amount of advertising of gambling in connection with sports and to promote more family-friendly environments at sports events. A number of the Australian sports leagues have agreed to not put gambling logos on their jerseys, to not have gambling advertisements in their stadiums. The idea is that they are trying to find a middle ground where they can profit commercially from gambling associations, but they can protect the values and the virtues of the game, especially with respect to youth engagement.”
When asked if she has any confidence that such measures could be taken, much less succeed, here in the United States, Balsam says, “Well, Australia was ahead of us by 30 some years in legalizing sports gambling. We’re in the infancy of it, and I’m not sure we’re going to wake up anytime soon.”
NCPG Neutrality
“The National Council on Problem Gambling is the only national nonprofit organization that seeks to minimize the economic and social costs associated with gambling addiction.” So says the statement that greets visitors to ncpg.org, adding, “NCPG is neutral on legalized gambling.”
AB asked Cole Wogoman, NCPG’s director of policy and partnerships, about said neutrality of the nation’s longest-active organization devoted to gambling issues, founded 54 years ago by Joseph A. Dunne and Robert Custer.
Says Wogoman, “When we were founded in 1972, we were founded by people in recovery from a gambling addiction, and they said two things:
“One, we do not want you to ever pass judgment on those who choose to gamble. That’s not the role of this organization. So when a state looks to legalize sports betting, we never say, ‘Don’t legalize’ or ‘Do legalize.’ We don’t do either one of those. We say, ‘If you choose to legalize, here are the best practices that we really need to have in place to try to prevent harm as much as we can.’ You’re never going to be able to eliminate gambling addiction. It’s going to exist, but we can put policies in place to minimize it.
“And then the second thing that our founders had in mind was, in order to make progress in this space, we have to be willing to go to the table with the industry or those who choose to gamble. We make a lot of progress by working with those sorts of companies and operators. That doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. In fact, we find that they’ve made mistakes quite a bit, and we work to correct them, but we are not in the business of turning our back and saying, ‘We refuse to hear what you guys have to say or help or coach you on how to do better.’ ”
