There was an uproar recently about Sydney Sweeney strutting around half-naked for a sports betting app because it was said to sexualise women and undermine their athletic achievements. Which maybe it did. I’m not really so sure. If it was a female athlete not a b-movie actor doing it, then maybe. If I’m missing something let me know.
Anyway, whatever.
The debate about what it did, or didn’t say, about female athletic achievement made no sense to me and completely missed the point as far as I’m concerned. The degenerate element of the whole thing wasn’t a half-naked Sweeney, but the existence of the app itself. And the fact that this wasn’t the point bothered me. Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about it, but it felt like another one of those hysterical flash-in-the-pan cultural moments where the focus was on the identity politics to the deliberate exclusion of the class-capitalist politics.
I like sports. Well some sports. Mainly football (soccer), tennis and athletics. But I hate what has been done to professional sports over the last 30 years. The capitalism of it. The teenage multi-millionaires, the corporate sponsorships, the private equity fund owners, the teams backed by nation states. But mainly I hate the culture of betting that has consumed professional sports.
Nineteen of the twenty teams in England’s premier league have sponsorship deals with sports betting companies. Nearly 300 European football teams have a deal with a betting company. Every sports podcast I listen to is saturated with ads for sports betting apps. On the first day of England’s premier league football last season, 30,000 gambling adverts were broadcast to audiences in stadiums and across TV, radio and social media. In the US, the NFL, the MBL and the NBA all have multiples deals with sports betting companies, with TV coverage of sports events showing a gambling advert every four minutes.
And the goal of it all is simple: get people (mainly young men) spending money they (mostly) don’t have, to line the pockets of millionaires and billionaires so they can buy another yacht or penthouse in New York or Paris, social costs be damned. And the social costs are huge. In the US, states that legalised sports betting after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling have seen a massive increase in sports betting alongside an astonishing, if predictable, 60% increase in gambling addiction. In the UK, a gambling addiction leads to hundreds of suicides every year, with millions of people now classified as having a moderate to severe gambling problem. In the US, millions of people have gambling debts in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It didn’t used to be like this. In the UK, it was Tony Blair’s Labour government which primed this environment, passing an act in 2005 which legalised online gambling, lifted all advertising restrictions and established a light-touch regulatory regime. It will come as no surprise that dozens of British politicians receive many thousands of pounds in bribes from gambling lobbyists every year. In the US it was the 2018 Supreme Court ruling lifting restrictions on sports betting which spurred a dramatic increase in betting and the associated harms. On top of this, the smart phone era has massively expanded the ability to gamble, to the point that you can now stake a “predictive” bet on almost anything happening anywhere in the world. Another Nepalese landslide before the end of the year? 9/1. A declaration of famine in Gaza? Odds even. I wish this was a sick joke. It’s not.
It’s all so repulsive and socially corrosive.
The culpability for this change is across the board, starting with the politicians who’ve legalised gambling on this scale, to the mainstream media outlets who’ve normalised it by teaming up with so-called predictive market apps. When it comes to sports betting, owners and commercial managers at football clubs and sporting events also bear responsibility, as do the athletes (both current and retired) who are more than happy to perpetuate harm for the financial reward on offer.
Just to be clear, I don’t expect anything else. We live in capitalism. Our system is organised by capitalists for capitalists, with profit and financial growth the singular cultural goal. If millions of people, especially working people, get eaten up by the machine in the pursuit of these goals, it categorically does not matter. Charles Livingstone, a WHO gambling expert, put it well: “For gambling companies, the best customers are those who go broke.”
Capitalist engineering has created a world where millions of people now find themselves in a weird parasocial relationship with an athlete, their fortunes entwined. Relationships like this are not only financially destructive, they can do things to a person’s capacity for emotional regulation. Tennis players say a huge amount of abuse they get is related to gambling. Nearly 50% of sports betting is now conducted in-play, with people able to bet on every conceivable development during a match. It strikes me that sports betting fundamentally changes not just an individual’s relationship with sport, but what sport is and even the function that it plays in society. No longer a community good, a shared experience or an entertaining couple of hours where you marvel at the skill and prowess of an athlete, sports betting financialises yet another component of human existence. The game or the match becomes inextricably tied to a person’s financial fortunes, and therefore to their emotional state. Sports betting is a dopaminergic substance, elevating both the highs of victory and lowering the lows of defeat. Gambling transforms sport from something to be watched not for the inherent enjoyment, but for the outcome only, and increasingly for specific micro-outcomes during play.
Just to reassure anyone wondering, absolutely none of this is personal testimony. For all the reasons outlined above, I’ve never gambled on sports or anything else. A friend did, and it was in part to blame for the breakdown of their marriage. But even that’s not the reason I wrote this. I just hate capitalism. And I hate what it does to people, to relationships, and to society. I hate that the worst of us, who have everything, manipulate their control of the system to profit from those who have almost nothing. I hate that so many people are constantly engaged to think about new and creative ways to manipulate people into adopting destructive and harmful behaviours. And I hate that under capitalism, this manipulation is not just normalised, but encouraged and rewarded.
There was no societal need to legalise sports betting in this way. Nothing was being lost from society without it. The creation of a permissive gambling culture has been entirely at the behest of capitalists who saw a missed opportunity to exploit people for financial gain. And in an era of algorithmic control and manipulation, this exploitation comes easy. With the expansion of gambling, especially sports betting, it feels like we’re losing another guardrail against societal breakdown. It feels like additional fuel for our atomisation. China knows this all too well, which is why most gambling is banned in the country, save for a couple of national lotteries. This strict regime is just one of the many reasons why China is winning and will continue to win over the west in, well, everything.
But I have to consider whether, in the long list of those culpable, I am also complicit. When I watch sports financed by degenerate billionaire swines, or listen to podcasts saturated with gambling adverts, am I perpetuating this harm? I suppose I have to concede that yes, I probably am. But when I zoom out from sports and look at my whole existence from a bird’s eye view, I can’t help but wonder about the harm perpetuated merely by my interactions with normative society.
Our taxes fund genocide, our purchases destroy the biosphere, our diets destroy ecosystems.
I try my best, but it is the system, not Sydney Sweeney rage-bait, which makes it almost impossible for us to do no harm.
I suppose I wonder really just what the fuck it is we’re doing.
And I wonder how we get out of this spiral.