Approximately 50 million Americans are expected to bet on this Sunday's Super Bowl clash between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs — a number that has increased dramatically over the last five years, coinciding with the Supreme Court in 2018 allowing individual states to create their own gambling-eligibility rules.
And on Super Sunday alone, Americans are expected to place approximately $16 billion worth of wagers — a single-day record for the industry.
There's a downside to this proliferation of sports-related bets, though, according to the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University.
"Gambling is a very different addiction from drugs or alcohol," said Lia Nower, a professor and director of Rutgers' gambling studies center. "If I'm drunk or high, at some point my family is going to figure it out. With gambling, I can be sitting with my kids, watching cartoons, and gambling away my house, my car, everything I own, on my mobile phone. How would you know?"
According to industry figures, $57 billion in sports wagers were made in 2021. And covering the first 11 months of 2022, the totality of sports wagers had ballooned to $83 billion. That represents a number that's 15 times higher than what the gambling industry reaped back in 2018, prior to the Supreme Court ruling.
"We have a movement toward expanding what was once considered a sin, what was once considered a vice, and embedding it at every level of American culture, down to kindergarten," said Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.
"Sports gambling market. Ten years ago, those words didn’t exist," Fong continued. "What you have is this massive, exponential expansion of gambling into homes, faster than we can study or monitor it."
Rutgers' Nower says these substantial changes could bring forth a number of painful consequences.
"Pete Rose was banned from baseball and blocked from the Hall of Fame because he gambled," said Nower. "Now, we've got professional ballplayers who are partnering with gambling companies. Now, kids are seeing these things inextricably linked."
People who bet on games, according to Daniel Barbarisi, author of "Dueling with Kings: High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get-Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports," are not tuning out games that devolve into blowout affairs — as long as bets pertaining to the final score, from a total points or points-spread perspective, remain in play.
Sports bettors are predominantly male, according to surveys. They are also mostly under 45 years old.
Also, surveys revealed that more than half of sports gamblers earn less than $50,000 a year.
"You can kind of draw a through line from the people who were involved in the poker boom in the early 2000s to the daily fantasy thing in the 2010s and then to the crypto thing," Barbarisi said.
"I don't know if you can say it's a small group of guys anymore. It's a big group of guys," added Barbarisi.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.