The House Always Wins: How America Built a Generation of Gamblers, Wired the Thrill of Sport to the Logic of Addiction
U.S. News ı By Rochdi Rais
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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.
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