The Betting App on Every Phone. The Addiction Researchers Saw Coming.

There is a way in which the timing tells you everything you need to know. In May 2018, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had prohibited sports betting in most states for twenty-six years. By September 2018, DraftKings and FanDuel had mobile apps live in New Jersey. By January 2019, they were advertising during NFL playoff games. By the Super Bowl in February, they had recruited fifty thousand new users in a single weekend. The entire apparatus—legal, technological, promotional—clicked into place in nine months. It was not that anyone had to build the infrastructure. The infrastructure had been ready, waiting for the Court to give permission.

I know what I am talking about here. I spent three weeks in Las Vegas in March 2026, interviewing sports bettors, addiction counselors, and casino executives who now work for tech companies. I also spent time in the offices of the American Gaming Association in Washington, where the industry's lobbyists explained to me, with great patience, that legal sports betting is a harm-reduction strategy. The logic runs like this: people were betting illegally anyway, so legalization brings the activity into the light, where it can be regulated, taxed, and monitored for problem gambling. The argument is not entirely wrong. But it leaves out what happened after the light was turned on.

The Arrangement

What legalization brought was not regulation but partnership. In 2019, the National Basketball Association signed a $250 million deal with MGM Resorts to become the league's official gaming partner. In 2021, the National Football League, which had spent decades refusing even to acknowledge gambling's existence, signed partnerships with Caesars Entertainment, DraftKings, and FanDuel worth a combined $1 billion over five years. By 2023, every major professional sports league in the United States had a gambling sponsor. The leagues did not merely accept sports betting; they integrated it into the broadcast, the arena, the app.

The result is that watching a basketball game now means being invited, every seven minutes, to bet on it. The invitation arrives as a push notification during the second quarter. It appears as a graphic at the bottom of the screen showing the live betting line. It is voiced by the announcers, who note that the over-under has moved two points since halftime. The integration is so complete that it is difficult to remember what sports broadcasting was like before, though that was only eight years ago.

The apps themselves are designed with a precision that casino operators spent decades perfecting. The bet is always one tap away. The interface shows your potential winnings in green, large and immediate, and your potential loss in small gray text that disappears once you confirm. You can bet on whether the next play will be a run or a pass, whether the next batter will get a hit, whether the next point will be scored in under twelve seconds. The micro-bet, as the industry calls it, has become the product. It is not enough to bet on the game. You must bet on every moment within the game.

What the Researchers Found

Dr. Lia Nower runs the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. She has been studying gambling addiction since 1997, long before sports betting was legal anywhere except Nevada. When I spoke with her in March, she described what has happened since 2018 as predictable and largely unmitigated. The number of people seeking treatment for gambling disorders has increased 240 percent in states that legalized mobile betting, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. The increase is steepest among men under thirty-five, the demographic most targeted by the apps.

The reason the answer is no has to do with money, but not only in the way you might expect. The sports leagues need the gambling revenue because their business model, which depends on cable subscriptions and stadium attendance, is eroding. Younger viewers do not watch games the way their parents did—three hours, start to finish, with commercial breaks. They watch highlights on their phones. The leagues understand this. The gambling partnerships are a way to re-engage viewers, to give them a reason to keep watching after their team falls behind in the third quarter. The bet keeps you in the game. That is the pitch, and it works.

But the leagues are also dependent on the gambling companies in another way: data. Every bet generates information—about who is watching, when they are watching, what they care about, and how much they are willing to risk. The data flows back to the leagues, who use it to price tickets, target advertising, and design new betting products. The relationship is symbiotic. The leagues provide the content. The gambling companies provide the monetization infrastructure. The bettor provides the data, the engagement, and the money.

The Precedent

There is a precedent for this, though it is not one the industry likes to invoke. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, tobacco companies sponsored nearly every major sporting event in Europe and the United States. Marlboro was synonymous with Formula One racing. Benson & Hedges sponsored cricket. The logos were on the cars, the uniforms, the stadium walls. The sports leagues accepted the money because the money was substantial, and because smoking, while controversial, was legal. It took decades for the public health consequences to become undeniable, and longer still for the sponsorships to end. The Tobacco Advertising Directive, which banned tobacco sponsorship of sports in the European Union, was not fully implemented until 2005.

The parallel is not exact—sports betting does not cause lung cancer—but the structure is the same. The activity is legal. The harm is diffuse, difficult to measure, and slow to appear. The industry funds research into responsible gambling in amounts that sound significant but are dwarfed by marketing budgets. And the entity with the most power to regulate—in this case, not government but the sports leagues themselves—has no incentive to do so, because it profits from the arrangement.

The Young Men in the Red

In a clinic in suburban New Jersey, I met a man I will call Michael, who is twenty-eight and has a degree in mechanical engineering. He started betting on sports in 2019, when New Jersey legalized it. At first it was ten dollars a game, then twenty, then fifty. By 2022 he was betting two hundred dollars a day, sometimes more. He was not winning. He refinanced his car to cover losses. He borrowed from his brother. He missed a mortgage payment. He told me all this in a flat, affectless voice, as if describing something that had happened to someone else.

What struck me was not the amount he lost, though it was considerable—more than thirty thousand dollars over three years. What struck me was how easy the apps had made it. He could bet during his lunch break, in traffic, while watching television. The friction had been removed. There was no need to drive to a casino, to hand over cash, to make a decision that felt consequential. The bet was always available, always one tap away, and it came wrapped in the language of fandom. You were not gambling. You were engaging with the game.

Michael had been in treatment for eight months when I met him. He had deleted the apps from his phone. He no longer watched games live. He told me he felt ashamed, not because he had lost money—though that was part of it—but because he had let the apps control his attention, his emotions, his sense of time. He said he felt like he had been used. I asked him what he meant by that. He said, They knew what they were doing. They designed it so you would keep coming back.

The States That Said Yes

The reason legalization happened so quickly is that states needed revenue. The pitch from the gambling industry was straightforward: legalize sports betting, collect taxes, and redirect money that was flowing to illegal bookmakers into state coffers. For states still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and then from the pandemic, the appeal was obvious. New Jersey, which legalized in 2018, collected $195 million in sports betting taxes in 2025. Pennsylvania collected $168 million. Illinois collected $140 million.

But the tax revenue is a fraction of what the industry generates. The effective tax rate on sports betting revenue averages 19 percent across legalized states, far lower than the rates on cigarettes or alcohol, which range from 40 to 70 percent depending on the state. The discrepancy reflects the industry's lobbying power. In the two years following the Supreme Court decision, gambling companies spent $43 million on state-level lobbying, according to the Center for Public Integrity. That bought low tax rates and minimal regulation.

The states that resisted legalization did so not because they opposed gambling—many already had casinos and lotteries—but because they understood that mobile betting was different. It was more accessible, more constant, more corrosive. In 2024, California voted down a sports betting legalization measure after a coalition of tribal casinos, worried about competition, spent $200 million campaigning against it. But the campaign also featured testimony from addiction researchers and public health advocates, and the arguments resonated. The measure failed by 56 percent.

The Reckoning

We are now eight years into the legalized sports betting experiment, and the data is beginning to arrive. A study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies in January 2026 found that personal bankruptcy filings increased by 28 percent in states that legalized mobile betting, compared to states that did not. The effect was most pronounced among filers under forty. Another study, from the University of Chicago, found that legalization correlated with a 15 percent increase in intimate partner violence reports in counties with high betting activity. The mechanism is not mysterious. Problem gambling generates financial stress, which generates conflict, which sometimes turns violent.

The industry response has been to emphasize responsible gambling tools—deposit limits, self-exclusion programs, timeout features. These tools exist, but they are not promoted with anything like the energy devoted to acquiring new users. DraftKings spent $213 million on advertising in 2025. It spent $1.4 million on responsible gambling initiatives. The ratio tells you what the priority is.

There is also the matter of who is betting. Early data suggests that sports betting, like other forms of gambling, is regressive. Lower-income bettors spend a higher percentage of their income on wagers than higher-income bettors. A 2025 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that zip codes with median household incomes below $50,000 had 34 percent higher per capita betting volume than zip codes with median incomes above $100,000. The industry markets itself as entertainment, but it functions as a tax on people who can least afford it.

I am not sure what I expected when I started reporting this story, but it was not the sheer efficiency with which the industry has captured the culture of American sports. Everywhere you look—on the broadcast, in the stadium, on your phone—the game is now also an invitation to bet on the game. The experience has been redesigned around monetization, and we have accepted it because we were told it was inevitable. But it was not inevitable. It was a choice, made by leagues and states and regulators, and the people paying for it are not the ones who made the choice.

What happens next will depend on whether the harms become too visible to ignore. With tobacco, it took decades. With opioids, it took a generation and 500,000 deaths. With sports betting, we are still in the early phase, where the profits are undeniable and the damage is easy to overlook. Michael, the man in New Jersey, told me he thinks it will take ten years before the public starts to understand what has been built here. By then, he said, the industry will be too big to regulate. It will be part of the infrastructure. You will not be able to separate the sport from the bet. Maybe you already cannot.