Note to readers: this is a topic I’ve been looking to cover since the later stages of the FIFA World Cup, when I stumbled across a 30-minute YouTube video by the (Spanish-language) independent media outlet El Mercurio Ahora o Nunca on the topic at hand. But each time I got down to writing the post, something more time-sensitive would come along, such as the recent “migrant” invasion of Ceuta or FIFA’s internal war, which continues to intensify…
The 2026 World Cup wasn’t just the biggest grossing sports event in history, generating an estimated $15 billion in revenues. It was the biggest betting event in history, with more than $50bn (£37.4bn) in wagers placed globally, according to the BBC.
In the US alone, the 2026 World Cup produced a 30% greater bet count and a few percentage points more total betting volume than the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments together, Caesars Sportsbook told ESPN.
Even compared to the 2022 edition, this year’s World Cup drove a massive surge in betting activity in the US. DraftKings reported a 650% jump in bets taken, while BetMGM saw a 211% increase from four years ago.
A large chunk of that growth comes down to timing and access, reports Inc.com:
Co-founder and CEO of Odditt Matt Bresler explained that the last time there was a World Cup, US mobile betting was live in a handful of states and still a niche product in most of them. “It was the first World Cup ever played in a market where mobile sports betting was legal for most of the population,” he says. “That combination had never existed.”
Since the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, granting individual states the right to legalise sports gambling, dozens of states have done just that. Encouraged by industry lobbyists and lured by the promise of increased tax revenue, 30 states plus Washington, DC, have legalised online and mobile sports betting while a further nine allow sports gambling in physical locations such as casinos and tribal gaming venues.
The response by punters has exceeded the wildest dreams of the gambling companies. In 2025, US citizens wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks, of which they lost a whopping $16 billion. According to a recent article in Fortune, “gambling is now America’s favorite pastime as Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums, and music combined”:
In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events. That’s more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.*
The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels. Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion. Live music like concerts and festivals brought in $18.51 billion. Meanwhile, book publishers tracked by the Association of American Publishers reported $14.6 billion for the year. And the U.S. museum industry generated an estimated $16.4 billion. Add it up and the total comes to roughly $70 billion, which is less than half what Americans wagered on sports.
“It fills that void, and it will crowd out other forms of entertainment, other forms of hospitality, for sure,” said Martin “Marty” Conway, an adjunct lecturer in Georgetown University’s Sports Industry Management program. Sports gambling, in all respects, has become more ubiquitous, and as a result, is becoming more accepted as yet another form of entertainment. “They’ve taken something that was just who’s going to win, and now you’re actually able to get involved in certain other events of the game. That’s a form of engagement as opposed to what we knew previously.”
Research also suggests this money is drawn away from more productive uses. Baker and co-authors studied consumer transactions from a sample of some 230,000 Americans from 2018 to 2023. They found that betting activity, for example, “crowds out” financial investment into brokerage accounts typically used for long-term savings.
It’s not just the amount of money being frittered on sports gambling in the US that should give pause; it’s the rate of increase. As the graphic below shows, just eight years ago, $6.6 billion was spent on legal sports gambling (of course, it’s impossible to know with any precision how much was being spent on illegal sports gambling before 2018). That amount has increased more than 20-fold since. While the growth rate has slowed in recent years, it is still above 10% per annum.
That comes on top of the huge sums of money that have flowed into prediction markets over the past couple of years, where bets on sports are also common, including in states where online gambling is still illegal, which in turn comes on top of all the money squandered during the crypto mania.
According to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of data from The Block, a digital assets media firm, combined monthly global trading volume on prediction market platforms has risen from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion in April 2026.
“Based on current third-party estimates of industry growth, U.S.-based activity on offshore prediction markets could grow to an estimated $133 billion in annual volume by 2030, assuming constant relative market shares of regulated and offshore markets,” notes a new research report from Crane Zeng, a boutique consulting firm specialising in analytics, political strategy, and prediction markets.
Companies such as Polymarket and Kalshi claim they are not gambling operators, which require approval to operate, but rather offer “event derivatives”, overseen at a federal level by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This distinction has so far enabled prediction markets to operate across most US states, including Utah and Hawaii, where gambling has long been illegal. More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed that challenge that interpretation.
The prediction markets industry, if one can even call it that, can count on the undivided support of the Trump administration. President Trump, whose son, Donald Trump Jr, has deep ties to the two biggest prediction market companies, has already weighed in on the issue, claiming it to be “critically important” that the CFTC maintain “exclusive authority” over prediction markets, rather than states. “It is a major Industry, and we must protect it.”
Collateral Damage
Meanwhile, the economic and social fallout from the rapid growth of online sports gambling is compounding at an alarming pace, while revenues and profits for the companies involved are skyrocketing. This is all happening at a time when the US is already suffering an acute cost-of-living crisis, with a recent poll suggesting that over 70% of middle-income Americans saying their income cannot keep up with the pace of inflation.
It seems that as economic conditions deteriorate for the vast majority and as opportunities dry up, more and more people are turning to sports gambling as a desperate last resort. At the same time, sports books are trying to make it harder to actually win money by turning parlays — a single sports wager that links two or more individual picks — into their default product. As Aakash Gupta points out, the product is getting worse for the customer yet the customer continues to wager more anyway.
As the FT reports in its March article, “The cost of America’s sports betting habit“, the staggered pace of legalisation across states has offered researchers a natural experiment in quantifying the economic consequences of this emerging trend, with non-gambling states serving as a control group:
The most obvious effect has been the rapid and persistent adoption by the people who live in the dosed states, according to the first of a trio of new studies. “You look at the sheer amount of play that people are doing, we see that more than quadruples across individuals in the state” after legalisation, says Wayne Taylor, a professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Taylor and co-authors analysed the credit and debit card activity of 1.2mn Americans from 2019 to 2023. They discovered an immediate leap in the amount of US gambling spending — from below $1 to almost $5 per person per month across the entire population — when online sports betting was introduced. Alongside that came an almost fourfold rise in the rate of “irresponsible gambling”, defined as spending 1 per cent or more of one’s income on bets.
These effects were swift and have stuck. “That’s the biggest change from six years ago,” Taylor says. “It’s become part of the American lifestyle now.”
A second study cited by the FT found that $1 of online sports betting deposits corresponds with a reduction in net investment — in other words, savings — of about 99 cents. The researchers also registered a sharp rise in credit card debt and the frequency of account overdraft, as well as a decrease in available credit. Credit ratings are also taking a sizable hit:
A third study, by Hollenbeck of UCLA and co-authors, used a proprietary consumer credit database covering more than 4mn Americans from 2016 to 2023 to identify a complementary laundry list of ill financial symptoms post-legalisation.
The average credit score fell nearly 1 per cent, the likelihood of bankruptcy filing increased by 25 to 30 per cent, and the amount of debt in collections increased 8 per cent.
“The effects are fairly small, but they are population-level, and it implies that the effects on the finances of people who are gambling a lot are probably pretty negative,” Hollenbeck says.
As NPR reports, a recent study from the New York Fed found that sports betting is linked to plummeting credit in the more than 30 U.S. states where the activity is legal, as well as in neighbouring counties where it was not:
Credit delinquency rates, primarily driven by missed payments on credit cards and auto loans, rose about 0.3% overall in states where sports betting is legal, despite legal sports bettors making up only 3% of the population. But, looking only at the 3% of the population who took up sports betting after their state legalized it, credit delinquencies spiked by more than 10% among gamblers. Credit delinquency means credit payments are at least 90 days past due.
That is not to say that everyone who engages in online gambling ends up losing their shirt. As a few FT readers were at pains to point out, the vast majority of gamblers have no trouble keeping their betting under control. So, why stop something that for the vast majority of people is harmless fun, and risk driving it underground?
The answer may be found in the ubiquity and ease-of-use of online gambling. Never before has it been so easy to place a bet on a sporting event, or a combination of sporting events. Via our smartphones, we all have a giant virtual casino in our pocket or handbag, and it’s open 24/7. It will also happily accept our credit — until the day our bank, or banks, put a block on it…
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Nick Corbishley 