Rob Minnick fell into debt for the first time at age 19. Sitting in the back of his classroom during a freshman year math class, the now-25-year-old placed a wager on the New York Yankees during an MLB spring training game that sent him into the red. He assured his parents it wouldn’t happen again.
“Then it would happen five more times over the next five years,” he told Fortune.
Minnick gambled away the unemployment checks he received from his college campus job as he waited out the COVID lockdown from his parents’ house. When the stock market tumbled at the beginning of the pandemic, he yanked money from his stock portfolio and sold his Bitcoin and Ethereum, using the money to stoke the flames of a growing gambling addiction.
“My thought was, I need to get this money out and make it back right now, and then I'll buy double what I just had, and then I'll hold it,” he said.
Minnick will admit his myopia now, but his financial habits surrounding his gambling disorder are far from singular. A new wave of studies has found an increasing number of Americans are dumping stocks and draining savings in order to fuel sports betting habits—and finding themselves in financial turmoil as a result.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018—effectively legalizing sports betting—U.S. sports betting revenue has exploded from $441 million in revenue in 2018 to almost $5.7 billion in 2024, according to Sportsbook Review.
The industry has reportedly minted billion-dollar deals between leagues and online platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel. And ahead of last year’s 2023 NFL season, 73 million Americans planned on placing bets. That’s a big payday for the sports book and sports industry, yet it’s a hole burned in the pocket of many gamblers.
“This is a money-losing proposition for most of these individuals,” Scott Baker, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Fortune. “On average, this is representing a drain to people's finances.”
Baker authored a study, which has yet to undergo peer review, that found that household bets increased $1,100 per year in states that legalized online sports betting. Meanwhile, the study also found a nearly 14% decrease in net investments in households after the introduction of legal online sports betting.
These gamblers are not just funneling money from other parts of an entertainment budget to sustain their betting habits, Baker said. Instead, they’re also using funds to attend sports games or watching sports in restaurants or bars, creating a snowball effect of money spent on sports betting and its accompanying entertainment activities.
“We're seeing that this gambling plus increases in consumption are both detracting from some of the longer run equity investments—or positive, easy, risky investments that people have been making—and tend to put more pressure and strain on their budgets in general,” Baker said.
A colleague in the field, Brett Hollenbeck, a marketing professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, can back up Baker’s findings. His working paper found that credit scores fell an average of 0.3% in states that had legalized sports betting four years after the activity became legal.
Using consumer credit data in the 38 states that have legalized sports betting in some form, the study also found increased rates of bankruptcy, debt collections, debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies following legalization.
“What's really unique about this is not just that sports gambling is a big, important industry,” Hollenbeck told Fortune. “But it gives us a window into how gambling causes people's behavior to change.”
Boom and bust
These behavioral changes are alarming to experts, who are concerned that the proliferation of sports betting is increasing the prevalence of gambling disorders.
“I've seen people end up losing their houses, losing everything—not just because of sports wagering, just because of where gambling disorder will take them,” Michelle Malkin, a criminal justice and criminology professor at East Carolina University, told Fortune.
Because legalized sports betting is a relatively recent development, it is difficult to know the extent of its consequences for gambling addiction, she said. But early studies are starting to paint a picture. In Connecticut, which legalized online sports betting in 2021, 71% of state legal gambling revenue comes from problem or at-risk gamblers—who make up just 7% of residents, a Gemini Research study conducted by University of Massachusetts professor Rachel Volberg found.
Malkin believes problem gambling will become a bigger issue so long as sports betting remains under-regulated. “We can't be winning everything off the backs of the people who are suffering most,” she said.
But for states that have legalized sports betting and are able to heavily tax winnings, the legal online gambling platforms have been a boon. In July alone, the Connecticut Lottery Corporation, the state’s official lottery, made $497,000 in gross revenue from over $4.7 million in patron winnings from sports retail wagers. A spokesperson from CT Lottery told Fortune the revenue is used in the state’s general fund, which invests in public health, libraries, and public safety. But advocates for greater gambling regulation warn this is only one piece of the puzzle.
“It's a marriage of the sports leagues, teams and players, media, online technology companies, the gambling companies—all under the partnership with the state government,” Harry Levant, clinician and director of gambling policy with the Public Health Advocacy Institute, told Fortune.
But it’s not just the legalization of sports betting that has led to its widespread popularity, Levant argued. Rather, it’s the growth of online platforms and apps that allow users to place frequent bets and experience the rush of instant gratification that accompanies them.
“What has happened since sports betting has been legalized—and now online casinos in seven states—is that the product is delivered as rapidly and as instantaneously as possible,” he said. “You can bet on the speed of every single pitch in every single baseball game.”
Sports betting apps hook users with aggressive sign-up bonuses and incentives to place the first bet and trust that the convenience and ease of their platforms will help them retain users.
“It gives them just another activity they can do on their phone,” marketing professor Hollenbeck said.
What the gaming industry is doing
Growing concerns about gambling disorder is top of mind for online sportsbooks and their partners. The NFL announced last week a $6 million, three-year partnership extension with the National Council on Problem Gambling to expand visibility of resources and educational materials.
The trade group American Gaming Association (AGA) has touted its efforts to increase consumer awareness of responsible gaming resources, such as wager and deposit limits. DraftKings offers a stat sheet to users to allow them to track their spending, while FanDuel has partnered with financial literacy nonprofit Operation HOPE. Both are members of the Responsible Online Gaming Association (ROGA).
“Currently, there is a misinterpretation that responsible gaming programs are intended only for those with a gambling problem, causing these programs and tools to be underutilized or ignored,” Jennifer Shatley, ROGA executive director, told Fortune. “In reality, the target audience for [responsible gaming] programs is the entire customer base, as these programs are designed to assist players with keeping gaming within their own personal limits.”
At the same time, the industry is skeptical of early data on what they say is an outsize relationship between the legalization of sports betting and gamblers’ financial behaviors. Not only is legal sports betting in its infancy, but data collected on personal finances following its legalization could be confounded by the pandemic, Shatley said.
Joe Maloney, senior vice president of strategic communications at AGA, told Fortune previous data on gambling—albeit in physical casinos instead of online sites—and financial outcomes like bankruptcy have not shown a significant relationship between the two. Moreover, gamblers understand that sports betting is a form of entertainment and set their financial expectations accordingly, he argued.
“Consumers in today’s legal, regulated market for sports wagering view this activity as a good value for their entertainment dollars, not as an expected, positive value investment,” Maloney said.
Gen Z’s big spenders
Minnick’s own gambling habit was jump-started by the 2018 legalization of sports betting, followed by the proliferation of dozens of apps seemingly tailored just for him. He and his group of college friends mirrored sports’ predominantly male fan base, and it wasn’t lost on him that he was the target for betting apps’ marketing.
“It's pretty obvious who it's trying to appeal to if Vanessa Hudgens is walking you through [a virtual casino], right?” Minnick said, referring to a Disney Channel actor from the early 2000s who was recently featured in a BetMGM advertisement. “It's not a big secret.”
While the open floodgates of sports betting can be a danger to anyone, early, conservative findings from Hollenbeck’s research suggests men—who experience gambling disorders at nearly twice the rate of women—and particularly Gen Z men are at higher risk of falling into financial disarray as a result of gambling. This could be because they are more interested in sports gambling and are sent targeted advertising from sports gambling platforms, he said.
The “Oracle of Wall Street” Meredith Whitney has even gone so far as to say young men’s love of sports betting will impact the housing market because they have no interest in getting married and moving out of their parents’ homes.
"It's all young men [betting on sports],” she said in a December 2023 CNBC interview. “And I dovetailed that with Pew Research which says that 63% of young men are single. And that's the highest it's ever been. And 50% of those young men have no interest in dating, not even casually."
Minnick, who hasn’t placed a bet in a couple years now, is battling against the stacked odds of Gen Z men getting hooked on sports betting. He’s a full-time content creator, working with teletherapy firms and state councils to design marketing for gambling disorder resources for young people.
“The root goal of everything is to try to help other people avoid making the same mistakes that I made,” he said.
He’s ditched the sportsbook apps and has ditched investing altogether, fearing a backslide into risky options trading that might as well be gambling. In place of the ricochet of emotions and funds that once defined his life, Minnick has opted for sturdier financial ground.
“At this point, the only thing I have is a solo 401(k),” he said. “And I haven't even funded it yet.”
