As the 2026 FIFA World Cup approaches — the biggest sporting event ever staged on American soil, a forty-eight-team, hundred-and-four-match spectacle spread across three nations and thirty-nine days — something else is approaching alongside it, quieter and less celebrated.

In the spring of 2024, a twenty-six-year-old named Adam, who worked a middle-management job in the Boston suburbs and had no particular history with vice, found himself standing in the bathroom of a restaurant, phone in hand, placing a live in-game wager on a Bruins match being played three miles away. His girlfriend was waiting at the table. He had bet — and lost — seventeen thousand dollars in the preceding eight weeks. He had told her none of it. He was not, by any measure that the industry would acknowledge, a problem gambler. He was a customer.

This is what the American gambling industry looked like by the time the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off on June 11th in Los Angeles: a fifty-state infrastructure, built in the eight years since the Supreme Court struck down the federal sports betting ban, that had quietly normalized the act of wagering on nearly every breath of athletic competition — the first pitch, the opening kickoff, the yellow card on the forty-third minute. The apps were frictionless, the promotions were relentless, and the machinery had been optimized, by the best behavioral engineers money could buy, to keep men like Adam at the table long after reason told them to leave.

The story of American gambling in the twenty-first century is, in many ways, the story of an industry that moved faster than the culture's ability to understand what was happening to it. It is a story about technology, and about law, and about the peculiarly American capacity to legalize something with great enthusiasm and regulate it as an afterthought. But it is also a story about something older and more human than any of that — about the way hope operates under pressure, about the particular vulnerability of a mind that believes, despite all evidence, that the next bet will be the one that makes it right.

"Gambling is where cigarettes were in the forties, when we had the Marlboro Man and every actress with a cigarette on one of those extenders. Right now it's glamorized. People are not understanding that this is an addiction like any other."— Lia Nower, Director, Center for Gambling Studies, Rutgers University

I.

A Decision by Nine Justices, and What It Unleashed

On May 14, 2018, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, striking down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which had effectively banned sports betting in most of the country. The ruling, dry in its legal language and immense in its practical consequence, was heralded by some as a triumph of states' rights and by others as a ticking clock. Within hours, casino stocks surged. Within months, New Jersey had a live market. Within six years, the industry had grown into something that would have been nearly unimaginable on the day of that ruling.

The numbers tell part of the story. [1] By the start of the 2026 World Cup, online sports betting was legal and operational in thirty-four states, and U.S. online sports betting revenue had grown 24.8 percent year-over-year in 2024 alone, reaching $13.78 billion. Online gambling now accounts for approximately thirty percent of all commercial gaming revenue in the country. The year 2024 marked the fourth consecutive year of record-breaking revenue for the industry — a streak that maps almost perfectly onto the period of rapid post-Murphy legalization.

• 34 states with legal online sports betting as of 2026
• $13.8B U.S. online sports betting revenue in 2024
• 85% of U.S. adults who have gambled at least once in their lifetime
• 2.5M U.S. adults estimated to suffer from gambling disorder

But the raw revenue figures obscure the more interesting transformation — the cultural one. Before 2018, gambling in America was largely a destination activity. You drove to Las Vegas, or to a riverboat in Mississippi, or to a tribal casino in Connecticut. The act required a degree of intention; it had a geography. What the smartphone app changed was not just the convenience but the psychology. The casino was now in your pocket. It was in the bathroom at the restaurant. It was available at 3 a.m. in the darkness of a bedroom, after the kids were asleep and the losses had already accumulated into something that felt, with a few drinks in, like an emergency to be solved by one more bet.

Consider the trajectory of online gambling participation in the United States. In 2018 — the year of the Murphy decision — fifteen percent of Americans gambled online. By 2024, that figure had risen to twenty-two percent. The National Council on Problem Gambling, which tracks these trends through its biennial NGAGE survey, noted with some concern that online gambling "is closely associated with risk" in ways that land-based gambling has never quite replicated. The format is different, and the danger is different.

II.

The Architecture of Entrapment

There is a particular passage in the history of American corporate wrongdoing where an industry, having secured its legal standing, begins to optimize its product not for the enjoyment of users but for their retention — and where "retention," in the cold language of product development, means something closer to dependency. The tobacco industry mapped this territory with devastating precision in the mid-twentieth century. The social media platforms charted it again in the 2010s. The sports betting industry arrived at the same crossroads in the 2020s, carrying all the technological advantages its predecessors lacked.

After Murphy, companies like DraftKings and FanDuel poured hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing. They signed celebrities — comedian Kevin Hart, former Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski — for campaigns that made betting feel like something the cool and the athletic did casually, between games, as a form of enhanced spectatorship. "There was just this blitz of advertisements that particularly appealed to younger people," Nower told reporters in late 2025. The sign-up bonuses were generous. The interfaces were sleek. The language of risk was carefully managed: it was not "gambling" but "gaming," not "losing" but "coming up short."

How the apps work against you

Multiple lawsuits filed against DraftKings and FanDuel in 2024 and 2025 allege that both platforms used personalized algorithms to identify users showing signs of addiction — and then, rather than intervening, sent them targeted promotions, gambling credits, and assigned "VIP Managers" who offered tailored incentives to continue betting. Users who demonstrated control or consistent success, according to the legal complaints, were often deprioritized from these programs.

The complaint language is clinical but the implication is stark: the platforms appear to have been designed, at some level of organizational intent, to identify their most vulnerable users and apply pressure at the exact moment of maximum fragility.

The lawsuit filed in 2025 by the City of Baltimore against DraftKings and FanDuel accused both companies of violating the city's Consumer Protection Ordinance by "exploiting vulnerable users who they knew were showing signs of gambling addiction." Since Maryland legalized mobile sports betting in 2021, the complaint noted, the state had seen an explosion in online wagering — particularly in urban centers like Baltimore. In fiscal year 2024 alone, Maryland residents wagered over five billion dollars on sportsbooks.

What made the apps particularly effective — and particularly dangerous — was a feature called the parlay bet. A parlay requires a bettor to correctly predict the outcomes of multiple games simultaneously; the odds are longer, the potential payout higher, and the house edge dramatically steeper. In 2018, seventeen percent of sports bettors placed parlay wagers. By 2024, that figure had nearly doubled, to thirty percent. Sports bettors who favor parlays are, the research suggests, among the most likely to develop disordered gambling behavior. They are also, from the industry's perspective, among its most lucrative customers.

"What I was doing was checking scores and putting in more bets, things of that sort. I would be up at all hours of the night — betting on this sport, that sport, sports in other countries that I knew nothing about."— Adam, 26, as reported by NHPR, December 2025

The apps introduced another significant innovation: live, in-play betting. Rather than placing a wager before a game begins, a bettor could now bet on what would happen in the next minute, the next drive, the next at-bat. Research has consistently found that in-play betting correlates strongly with gambling severity and impulsivity — it compresses the feedback loop between stimulus and response in ways that more closely resemble a slot machine than a sports bet. The industry knew this. It sold it as a feature.

III.

A Generation at Risk

To understand who the industry was building its product for, it is useful to look at the demographic data. Approximately eighty-five percent of U.S. adults have gambled at least once in their lifetime. Sixty-six percent have gambled in the past year. These are striking numbers on their own. But the crisis within the crisis lies in what has happened to specific populations — particularly young men.

Research from the University of California found that 4.2 percent of male gamblers were problem gamblers, compared to 2.9 percent of women. A study published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors found that ninety-one percent of college men and eighty-four percent of college women reported gambling — and that fourteen percent of the male college gamblers were doing so at problematic levels. Harvard Medical School reports that seven percent of college students already meet the criteria for problem gambling, a figure that would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago.

20M Americans who reported at least one indicator of problematic gambling behavior "many times" — roughly 8% of all adults according to NCPG NGAGE 3.0 Survey, 2024.

The NCPG's 2024 NGAGE survey — the most comprehensive national tracking study of its kind — estimated that 2.5 million adults are likely to suffer from gambling disorder, with an additional five to eight million exhibiting some form of problematic behavior. Altogether, the survey found that eight percent of American adults — approximately twenty million people — reported experiencing at least one indicator of problematic gambling behavior "many times." That is not a fringe phenomenon. That is a public health condition of considerable scale.

What the numbers cannot fully capture is the machinery by which young people, specifically, were brought into the ecosystem. People aged eighteen to twenty-seven accounted for forty-four percent of all esports bets in 2024, up from thirty-six percent the year before. Bettors aged eighteen to forty-three made up eighty-seven percent of total esports betting activity. These are not casual hobbyists — they are a target demographic, identified and cultivated with the same precision that the cigarette companies once applied to the question of getting teenagers to smoke before the habit could be dislodged.

The sports leagues — the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball — understood the revenue implications of this new world and moved toward it with enthusiasm. Jerseys gained sponsor patches from sportsbooks. Stadiums bore the names of betting companies on their digital boards. DraftKings logos appeared on the helmets of the broadcast crews. The integration was so total and so rapid that it became, within a few years, invisible — background noise. A young fan watching an NFL game in 2024 would have difficulty identifying which elements of the broadcast were entertainment and which were advertising for a product designed to extract money from him.

Research finding

Sports bettors are three times more likely to experience problem gambling than other gamblers. The risk is particularly high for those who engage in "in-play" or live betting — a practice that correlates strongly with gambling severity and impulsivity.

Only 39% of Americans view gambling addiction as "very serious," compared to 62% for drug addiction and 55% for alcoholism — despite research suggesting it carries comparable or greater psychiatric risk.

There is a particular cruelty in the design of the sign-up promotions. The "risk-free bet" — a staple of virtually every major platform's customer acquisition strategy — is not, as the name suggests, without risk. It is a mechanism for getting a new user to bet a larger amount than they otherwise would, experience the neurological reward of the action, lose the money, receive a credit that can only be used on another bet, and thus be drawn back into the cycle before the first session has concluded. The DraftKings litigation in Pennsylvania, filed in mid-2025, alleged that such promotions had been specifically designed to "instill gambling addiction" in new users.

IV.

The Silence at the End of the Line

There is something that the industry's promotional materials do not mention, and that the sports broadcast's scrolling odds tickers do not acknowledge, and that the DraftKings app does not disclose in any of its onboarding flows. Problem gambling is, by a significant margin, one of the most lethal psychiatric conditions in the clinical literature. The connection is not peripheral or theoretical. It is, by multiple recent measures, more pronounced than the association between suicide and depression, schizophrenia, or alcohol use disorder.

A landmark study published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe in late 2024, using Norwegian national health registry data, examined the risk of suicide mortality among people diagnosed with gambling disorder between 2008 and 2021. The findings were stark. A gambling diagnosis was found to be a stronger predictor of suicide than other major mental health conditions — including depression. The study's lead author, Professor Simon Dymond of Swansea University, described gambling harm as "a growing global health concern" that, until recently, had not been properly tracked at the level of mortality.

• 28% of problem gamblers reported suicidal ideation, per Rutgers University study
• 20% had made a suicide attempt
• 35.4% of high-engagement multi-platform gamblers had suicidal thoughts within 3 months of reporting their gambling
• 15× more likely to attempt suicide — gambling addicts vs. general population

The Rutgers University Center for Gambling Studies has produced some of the most granular data on this relationship in the American context. Their findings: twenty-eight percent of problem gamblers reported suicidal ideation. Twenty percent had made a suicide attempt. Twenty-six percent had engaged in non-suicidal self-injury. Sports bettors and horse-race bettors, specifically, reported statistically higher rates of moderate to severe mental health problems — including depression and anxiety — compared to other types of gamblers. Twenty-one percent of sports bettors in the survey indicated that they had wished they were dead.

A January 2026 study from the University of Glasgow and City St George's, University of London, analyzing data from regular sports bettors at two separate time points, found something even more alarming: among the subset of bettors who engaged heavily in multiple gambling formats — sports betting combined with online casino games and land-based slots — 35.4 percent had suicidal thoughts and 27.8 percent had made a suicide attempt in the three months after they reported gambling. This is not a marginal population. This is a population being produced, systematically and at scale, by an industry operating largely without meaningful oversight.

"A gambling diagnosis was a stronger predictor of suicide than other mental health conditions, such as depression, schizophrenia, or alcohol use — indicating gambling disorder poses a unique risk."— Professor Simon Dymond, Swansea University, November 2025

The research published in The Lancet Public Health, examining gambling-related suicidality from an epidemiological perspective, noted that despite the accumulating evidence, most countries still had inadequate data on the role of gambling in suicide deaths — because coroners and medical examiners rarely ask about gambling history, and clinicians rarely screen for it. Gambling harm is, in Dymond's phrase, "still too often recognized only at the point of crisis." By then, the house has already won.

Professor Dymond's research team identified what it called "missed opportunities for earlier support and intervention" — patients with gambling disorder who had recent contact with mental health services, often through hospital admissions, but who were not identified as gambling-disordered until a crisis point. The conclusion is uncomfortable: the healthcare system has not caught up to the scale of the problem it is dealing with, in part because the problem has grown faster than the institutional capacity to name it.

V.

The World Cup as Accelerant

In the days before the 2026 FIFA World Cup began, Brian Josephs, Vice President of Americas for Sportradar, offered an analogy that captured the moment with uncomfortable clarity. "The Super Bowl is the pinnacle," he said, "but the World Cup is going to be a couple dozen Super Bowls back-to-back-to-back-to-back over the span of six weeks." He meant it as a statement of commercial opportunity. The research suggests it should be read as something closer to a warning.

2026 FIFA World Cup — Betting Projections

• $60 Billion Estimated global wagering at regulated sportsbooks · H2 Gambling Capital · A 71% jump from 2022
• $3.3B U.S. base-case betting handle estimate (Deutsche Bank)
• 104 matches across 39 days — up from 64 in 2022
• 29% of U.S. bettors expected to wager on World Cup for the first time

The projections are staggering. Deutsche Bank analysts estimated the tournament could produce between $2.5 billion and $4.1 billion in U.S. betting handle alone, with a base case of $3.3 billion — more than double what was wagered on the 2022 Qatar World Cup. H2 Gambling Capital estimated that sixty billion dollars would be wagered globally at regulated sportsbooks, a seventy-one percent jump from 2022. Gaming research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming projected that DraftKings alone would handle approximately $1.02 billion in World Cup bets, with FanDuel close behind at $945 million.

A survey commissioned by global payment platform Paysafe found that twenty-nine percent of U.S. bettors would be gambling on the World Cup for the first time. This is the industry's language for what it is: a customer acquisition event. For the companies, the World Cup represents "one of the most aggressive customer acquisition periods the U.S. gambling industry has experienced in years," as one industry analysis put it. For public health researchers, it represents the potential induction of millions of new users into a system that a significant proportion of them will not be able to exit cleanly.

The tournament's expanded format — forty-eight teams instead of thirty-two, generating one hundred and four matches over thirty-nine days — means that the betting calendar is essentially continuous for the duration of the event. The markets are everywhere: match outcomes, first goalscorer, total corners, yellow cards, penalty-kick placement. DraftKings confirmed to ESPN that it would offer yellow card betting for the World Cup in permitted states. A game that used to be watched with a beer in hand can now be watched with a phone in hand and a live in-play parlay running on the referee's next decision.

The trust problem

A survey released in June 2026 by SEON, a fraud prevention company, found that nearly half of Americans do not trust betting platforms to protect their personal data — and yet plan to bet on the World Cup anyway. Twenty-two percent of consumers admitted to creating multiple betting accounts to chase promotions. One in four had already encountered World Cup-related scams before the opening match.

The image that emerges is of a population that understands, at some level, that it is operating in a compromised environment — and that bets anyway. This is not irrationality. It is something more troubling: an industry that has successfully normalized participation despite acknowledged risk.

The Lancet's Americas health journal, in a paper published in August 2025 examining the gambling risks associated specifically with the World Cup, noted that the tournament's arrival in the United States, Canada, and Mexico represented "a critical moment of mass exposure to betting advertisements" — and that the health, economic, and social impacts of that exposure had not been sufficiently considered at the policy level. The paper cited a 2024 systematic review finding that approximately 61.3 percent of adults in North America had reported gambling within the past twelve months, and that 13.8 percent of those were engaging in risk gambling activities. Among adolescents, 33.7 percent reported gambling — with 27.8 percent of those in the high-risk category.

The financial implications for ordinary households are not academic. Up to twenty-three million Americans carry debt attributable to gambling, according to Debt.org. Approximately twenty percent of problem gamblers file for bankruptcy due to gambling debts. Up to fifty percent of individuals with severe gambling disorder engage in criminal activity — theft, fraud — to support their habit. The World Cup, arriving in the summer of 2026 with its thirty-nine days of continuous betting opportunities and its aggressive promotional campaigns targeting first-time bettors, will produce some number of people who did not have a gambling problem in June and do by August. The industry knows this. It has built its business model around it.

VI.

What the Industry Understood, and When

There is a document that surfaces repeatedly in the sports betting litigation now making its way through American courts: the internal product specification. It is a category of corporate record, familiar to anyone who has studied the history of tobacco or social media, that reveals the gap between what a company says to regulators and what its engineers are told to build. In the DraftKings and FanDuel cases, the emerging picture is of platforms that deployed, with considerable sophistication, the tools of behavioral economics against their own users.

The complaint against DraftKings filed in Pennsylvania in mid-2025 alleged that the platform used algorithms to identify users exhibiting signs of addiction and then offered them targeted credits and promotions — not as a customer-service gesture, but as a retention mechanism. The Baltimore city lawsuit alleged that both DraftKings and FanDuel used "personalized algorithms, targeted promotions and retention tactics to exploit vulnerable users." The pattern alleged in lawsuit after lawsuit is consistent: users who show restraint or success receive less attention; users who chase losses receive VIP Managers and bonus credits and push notifications at 11 p.m.

The most recent lawsuits, filed in early June 2026, went further. Two plaintiffs alleged that after they began showing signs of problem gambling — irregular session lengths, escalating wagers, behavioral patterns that the companies' own algorithms would have flagged — they received tailored promotional offers rather than intervention. The companies, the complaints allege, had access to the data that would have identified these users as at risk and chose, as a business decision, to monetize them instead.

This is the architecture of the modern gambling crisis in America. It is not primarily a story about individual weakness, though individual weakness is part of it. It is a story about systems — about the deliberate design of products to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities, about the deployment of behavioral data at scale against the people who generated it, about an industry that lobbied for legalization by promising responsible gaming measures and then, having secured its markets, built VIP programs for its most addicted customers.

64% of Americans have never heard of 1-800-GAMBLER, the national problem gambling helpline — despite the industry's "responsible gaming" messaging.

The responsible gaming messaging, it turns out, is largely performative. Sixty-four percent of Americans have never heard of 1-800-GAMBLER, the national problem gambling helpline — despite the industry's years of advertising. Among those who are themselves at highest risk, treatment skepticism is high: thirty-seven percent of people engaging in risky gambling behavior believe recovery is unlikely, more than double the rate of the general gambling population. The people the system most needs to reach are the least likely to believe that any help is available.

VII.

The Reckoning, Deferred

There is a version of the future in which the American gambling industry's reckoning arrives in roughly the way that the tobacco reckoning arrived — with a cascade of litigation, a congressional hearing or two, a large settlement, and then a reorganized industry operating under tighter constraints, slightly less profitable, slightly more honest about what it was doing and to whom. This outcome is possible. The litigation is real, the research is accumulating, and the political pressure is not entirely absent.

But there is another version in which the World Cup passes, generating billions in revenue for the sportsbooks and a manageable number of gambling-related crises that are absorbed quietly by emergency rooms and bankruptcy courts and the families of men and women who find themselves in places they cannot explain, with losses they cannot repay, in the middle of the night. In this version, the industry continues to grow, the responsible gaming messaging continues to run at the end of every commercial, and the research on suicide risk accumulates in academic journals that very few people will read.

The gap between those two futures lies, in large part, in whether the people who make policy decisions about gambling are willing to treat it as what the research has established it to be: not a leisure industry with a small number of problem users at the margins, but an addiction industry with a significant minority of severely harmed users at its core, and a much larger population of people being gradually acclimated to behaviors that carry real risk.

The evidence, at this point, is not ambiguous. Gambling disorder is more strongly associated with suicide mortality than depression. The platforms have been alleged, in multiple legal venues, to have specifically targeted their most vulnerable users with retention mechanisms. The industry has expanded with a speed that far outpaced any regulatory infrastructure capable of managing its harms. The World Cup — thirty-nine days, one hundred and four matches, sixty billion dollars in projected global wagers, and twenty-nine percent of American bettors participating for the first time — is arriving into this context like a match dropped into a room that has been filling with gas for eight years.

"The Super Bowl is the pinnacle, but the World Cup is going to be a couple dozen Super Bowls back-to-back-to-back-to-back over the span of six weeks."— Brian Josephs, Vice President of Americas, Sportradar

Adam, the young man from the Boston suburbs, eventually told his girlfriend. He sought treatment. He stopped betting. He is one of the better outcomes — better, at least, than the outcomes that the researchers at King's College London and Rutgers and Swansea University and the Lancet have been documenting with growing urgency in the past several years. The industry will not mention him in its earnings calls. His losses — the seventeen thousand dollars, the weeks of lying, the 3 a.m. wagers on sports he didn't understand — will appear, somewhere in a spreadsheet, as revenue. The house took that money and recorded it as a win. Which, of course, is exactly what it was.

The question, as the opening whistle of the 2026 World Cup drew near and the apps pushed their promotions and the broadcast logos scrolled and the parlay windows opened on sixty million smartphones simultaneously, was whether anyone in a position of authority had any intention of making this stop. The evidence, so far, suggests not. The house was still winning. The house was always going to win. That was, from the beginning, the whole point. Addiction Also Grows.