Would Sports Still Be As Popular Without Gambling?

Many years ago, there was a tagline from a betting company that declared ‘It matters more when there’s money on it’. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, it didn’t last long before the United Kingdom Gambling Commission said that it was not an acceptable tagline to have as it seemed to encourage people to place bets on events.

Whilst that is obviously true, there is also a reality that, for many people, placing a bet on a sport does make it more interesting. Indeed, there are likely to be quite a lot of people that wouldn’t watch events they hadn’t bet on.

There will always be passionate supporters of the likes of football and rugby teams who would watch their team play no matter what. You only need to look at non-league sides on a Saturday when the rain or snow is falling and the wind is whipping around the ground to appreciate that.

Yet how many would watch matches that their team isn’t involved in if they hadn’t placed a bet on the outcome? How dependent on gambling have sports become nowadays? Obviously they need the funding, but do they also need it for the attention?

It Is No Longer About The Spectacle

In the past, sporting events were mostly about what happened on the turf. Whilst people have been able to place bets, either legally or otherwise, almost since sports first began to welcome spectators, it wasn’t as prevalent as it is nowadays.

Before the advent of mobile phones and online betting, people would head out to watch a sporting event with nothing but the result in mind. They weren’t able to place bets in the same way that modern sports fans can, so obviously the gambling aspect of it all never even occurred to them to do.

In the modern era, that is no longer true. If you sit down to watch a football match, a tennis tournament or the darts, you have the opportunity to place bets on almost every aspect of the event in question. The fact that you are usually bombarded with adverts for gambling firms doesn’t help matters, making you even more tempted to place a bet.

The idea of watching something just for the purposes of watching it is almost all but done with. The purity of most events as sporting spectacles has pretty much disappeared for the majority of people.

Watching Things You Don’t Care About

Sometimes, the Premier League offers an exciting title race, with two teams going up against one another and trading blows along the way. That was the case for a number of years when Manchester City and Liverpool were going head-to-head for the title, meaning that supporters of each team would watch the matches of the other side in the hope of seeing them drop points.

More often than not, though, people will sit down to watch a Premier League, Championship or Football League match without any skin in the game.

Part of the reason that they do so is because they’re able to place a bet on what they’re watching, with many people only choosing to turn on the sporting even in question precisely because of that ability to place a wager on it. As a result, many will choose to be engrossed in something that they wouldn’t watch in any other circumstance.

The viewing figures of the likes of Sky Sports and BT Sport would be much lower if people weren’t able to place bets on the matches that the broadcasters had chosen to show on any given afternoon.

Horse Racing A Key Example

Of all of the sports that exist, perhaps none are as clear an example of the symbiosis between the sport and the world of gambling quite like horse racing. Races are sponsored by betting companies, the horse racing levy seems money that is spent on betting go straight back into the sport and bookmakers make most of their money during the year from the biggest meetings such as Royal Ascot, the Cheltenham Festival and the Grand National. Indeed, a lot of people wouldn’t ever watch horse racing if not for placing bets on the races.

In 2017, Australian bettors looked to place around AU$1.5 billion on bets between August and the conclusion of the Spring Carnival. About AU$140 million of that was spent on the Melbourne Cup alone. It is fair to say, therefore, that Australians wouldn’t have been as quick to watch horse racing if they weren’t placing bets on the races that were taking place. In many ways, though, the horse racing is nothing more than the pre-cursor to what is happening with many other sports. Australians spent around AU$7.2 billion on sports betting other than horse racing in 2014-2015, for example.

Perhaps it is no surprise, therefore, that the Alliance for Gambling Reform declared that sports betting was the ‘fastest growing level of addiction’ in the country. With people spending so much money gambling, it is hard to escape the idea that they are doing so in order to make what they’re watching more interesting. For many, that might well feel like something that is done specifically with horse racing because they do not understand the intricacies of it as a sport in the same way that the would a sport like football, tennis or another sport that they might play.

Not All Sports Lend Themselves To Supporting Someone

Whilst tennis fans will often have their favourites, you don’t get support of a specific tennis player in the same way that you do with a sport such as football. Head into the centre of a city and you’re unlikely to see people walking around wearing a Roger Federer top, for example, but wouldn’t be surprised if you saw someone in a replica Liverpool kit. As a result, people will often choose to place bets on a tennis match in order to give them a reason to want one particular outcome over another one, rather than just watching the match for entertainment.

Gambling has become a necessary addition to the sports-watching experience for many. It is seen as a way of adding entertainment to things that they have no personal investment in. Even when watching an even that they do care about, such as Liverpool supporters watching one of their games, being able to have a bet on which team will win the first corner or score the first goal means that there is extra skin in the game. If it can add interest for people that already have skin in the game, the logical conclusion is that it will definitely do so for those that don’t.

Younger People Are Used To Distractions

It might be patronising to say as much, but younger people tended to have lower attention spans than older folk. Those that grew up having to go to church every Sunday, for example, developed a tolerance for being bored. Younger people not only didn’t do that, in the majority of cases at least, but also grew up being able to jump onto social media whilst watching a TV show, or pausing live television in order to go and make a cup of tea. There is a sense, whether true or not, that young people haven’t ever had to wait for anything.

Around 90% of the people that gamble online are men, boasting an average age of 31. This is the generation that grew up with iPhones, FIFA and the ability to multitask whilst doing something else. Little wonder, therefore, that they are comfortable placing bets at the same time that they watch a sports event. There is a sense that younger people want instant gratification, which betting In-Play allows them to experience. The fact that younger people also get bored easily is another factor that gambling companies latch onto.

Sports Have Encouraged The Integration

The desire of many to place bets whilst watching a sporting event is why the sports themselves have tended to positively encourage the integration of gambling companies. There was a time when 50% of Premier League teams had a main sponsor that was a gambling company. When Joey Barton was issued a suspension from football for gambling, the Football Association itself was being sponsored by Ladbrokes. That as many as one in four people aged 18 to 24 shows signs of gambling addiction isn’t of interest to the footballing authorities.

Not that the likes of the FA would admit as much. The English Football League declared that it was ‘of the firm belief that there is no conflict in having a commercial relationship with the gaming industry’. Indeed, it will only be if the government, via the likes of the UKGC or a reform of the 2005 Gambling Act, decide that football can’t have such a close relationship with football that the sport will move away from that. Otherwise, it knows that if it does cut down on its relationship with gambling then it will lose at least some of its audience.

Would Less Gambling Lead To A Lower Audience?

It is, in many ways, an impossible question to answer. Would less integration between gambling and sports result in lower audience figures? If the genie of In-Play betting was put back into the bottle, would fewer people tune in to watch Stoke City versus Blackburn Rovers, say? Certainly the evidence seems to suggest as much. A sport like cricket is unlikely to lose vast swathes of people if betting on it was suddenly out-lawed, simply because it is too complicated to understand for many, let alone place bets on.

Yet at the same time, those people who don’t care about Tottenham Hotspur versus Crystal Palace but watch it because they have placed a bet on it would no longer do so. Similarly, English people that don’t know the first thing about the NFL but tune-in to watch the Super Bowl because they’ve placed a wager on the outcome would soon find themselves needing to discover another passion. The same would be true of causal tennis fans, rugby watchers that don’t care about rugby and countless different people who only watch horse racing because they’ve got a bet on a race.

It Isn’t Die-Hard Supporters That Would Lose Interest

If you’re the sort of person that has a season ticket for a football team or will watch any golf that is on the television, it is safe to say that you’re not the sort of person that sports organisations are worried about. There are undoubtedly vast swathes of people who will never stop watching their favourite sporting events for any reason, with gambling being low on the list of reasons that they watch in the first place. Yet it is almost certain that there is a large percentage of people that either watch sports on TV or in person because of the bets that they can place on it.

It isn’t exactly out of the realms of the possible, for example, that someone would go to see some horse racing live and place bets on the races that they’re watching that day, when they have not watched any other racing at any other time in the year. The Grand National is a good example of a race that millions tune in to watch and place a bet on, but probably wouldn’t watch if they didn’t have money riding on it. As an industry, horse racing is terrified about losing those people and the money that they get from the levy that comes with them.

There is certainly an argument to be made that the main reason why sports won’t move to curb the influence of gambling companies is that they’re worried about how many people that currently watch them that they’ll lose along the way. Whilst the likes of football would cope, less popular sports that need to offer people something extra to get them involved almost certainly wouldn’t. Most people go to Wimbledon because they love watching the tennis in England, but the same people don’t tune in to watch the US Open tennis. The problem is, they might if they’ve got a bet on it.