“Sports betting addiction acts as a real “poor man’s wealth tax””

AWhen the sports budget is threatened by severe cuts, a crucial question arises: how to sustainably finance sports policy, particularly after the momentum generated by the Olympic and Paralympic Games? A financing avenue deserves to be seriously studied within the framework of the next finance bill: what if sports betting, which generates massive profits, contributed more to supporting sport itself, instead of only filling pockets bookmakers?

The summer of 2024 will have been of exceptional sporting density: between Euro football 2024 and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, we have been copiously served with strong and collective emotions. This is where the beauty of sport lies: producing moments of popular fervor that bring people together and create commonality beyond the divisions of our societies.

Unfortunately, it is clear that these emotions are shamelessly exploited by online sports betting operators. Since the liberalization of the market in 2010, they have competed in advertising ingenuity, promising to make us “live sport stronger”which “the most important thing is to win” money, even going so far as to imply that betting can contribute to social success.

An ever more captive clientele

If the National Gaming Authority (ANJ), responsible for regulating the sector year after year, recently tried to clean up some of the most shameful slogans (notably the infamous “Everything for the lady”), it is clear that this does not slow down the increase in stakes, which continue to grow exponentially.

For football alone, uploads amounted, according to the ANJ, to 135 million euros during Euro 2016, to 332 million euros for the 2018 World Cup, to 425 million euros on the occasion of Euro 2020, which was held in 2021, and, finally, to 597 million during the last World Cup, in 2022. And, as expected, 2024 will be a record year, with already 650 million euros of bets on the Euro and 365 million on the Olympic Games, or more than 1 billion euros on these two events.

The operators have understood this well and are flooding the public space, our screens and even the outfits of athletes, when they have not directly created their own media to keep an ever more captive clientele in their nets, but also to enter new players into the spiral of addiction.

The illusory hope of the big prize, however, has devastating effects on the health of players. Whether it is over-indebtedness, the risk of job loss, psychological and physical consequences such as depression, isolation or the risk of suicide, we are sometimes told that this only concerns a minority of people. players with excessive practice. But it is precisely these players who are driving the growth of the sector and lining the pockets of operators.

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