‘Everybody Loses’ tallies the steep costs of sports gambling

Over the hours I spent reading Danny Funt’s “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling,” I tracked the number of ads I encountered for FanDuel, DraftKings and numerous other legal sports books when I momentarily stopped to scroll social media or glance at a game on television. I counted 17, all during brief breaks in concentration — if I had counted moments when I wasn’t reading the book, the number would have been exponentially higher.

Less than a decade after the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. NCAA, which overturned a law that had prohibited states from authorizing sports gambling, sports gambling is inescapable. Ads for FanDuel, DraftKings and their ilk — many of which feature retired athletes — flood social media and television; every major professional sports league, as well as the NCAA, has a relationship with gambling companies, as do many individual teams. It is impossible to watch sports now and not be reminded that you can bet on them, including the very game on your screen.

The results are invariably bleak: Addiction — particularly among young men — is skyrocketing; trust in the legitimacy of sports is falling precipitously. Funt begins with a simple question: “What do we stand to gain, and what are we willing to lose?” By the end of the book, the answer is clear. People, sports and society are all worse off because of legal gambling, which benefits only a handful of sports books that have rigged the system in their favor and are raking in cash. That’s the trade-off, if you can call it that.

“Everybody Loses” focuses in part on gambling’s familiar personal costs. Matt, a fifth-grade teacher who spoke to Funt, started gambling on sports to alleviate boredom during the pandemic. He began with daily fantasy games and before long was fully addicted, betting on sports he knew little about, like cricket and Middle Eastern soccer. He blew more than $100,000 in a year and a half, siphoning off his wife’s salary and money his in-laws had given him for house payments. Funt talked to many people, most of them men, with similar stories. In nearly every case, it’s clear that their addictions were primed and exploited by the dominant apps — and by companies that see their customers as rubes to be bled dry, not vulnerable people who might be spiraling out of control.

There are also growing costs within sports. For some athletes, a previously inconsequential missed shot can now lead — if it screws up the spread or someone’s parlay — to racist and sexist abuse, death threats and even stalking from disgruntled gamblers. And there are rising concerns about the integrity of competition, thanks to a wave of gambling-related scandals that have affected practically every major sport in the country in recent years.

But the greatest strength of “Everybody Loses” is its breadth — Funt takes the reader inside every level of the seedy, corrupt, dispiriting world of sports gambling. This is a twisted travelogue of sorts, each chapter devoted to a circle of hell populated by one group of sports gambling’s myriad losers. The addicts and athletes; college students burdened by crushing debt; families destroyed by secret addiction; “successful” gamblers eking out a living by devoting every second of their lives to finding an edge; media organizations and leagues that lose more credibility with every gambling promotion; and the vampiric sports books themselves.

Those sports books offer a promise familiar and integral to American history: easy money. (In many cases, they start new users off with some free money.) But Funt’s writing about sports gambling’s “winners” is almost as depressing as the look at its losers. Isaac Rose-Berman, who makes thousands by studying infinitesimal details — a specific tennis player’s serve, for instance — is one of the book’s more enthralling characters. A whiz kid in his early 20s, he frets about what his vocation is doing to society — he speaks to high school students about its dangers — and himself. Sports gambling has cost him his social life and is so stressful that he fears he’s losing his hair. (“I love my hair,” he told Funt.) But he can’t stop.

Most successful gamblers are barely allowed to use the mainstream legal apps, if at all. Sports books quickly limit, or outright ban, big winners, who then go to great lengths to wager — they often recruit people to bet on their behalf — before being found out and banned again. But winning big is almost impossible, and the apps are extraordinarily well-calibrated to keep losers hooked. It’s such a dark business, you even start to feel bad for the VIPs — wealthy clients who spend thousands a week gambling on sports. “There’s a perception that to be a VIP is to be immune to the dangers of losing money,” Funt writes, “but of course the thrill of gambling usually comes from risking whatever it takes to make a person sweat, at least a little.” In other words, it isn’t just schoolteachers who lose their shirts.

One of Funt’s best, most infuriating and most clear-eyed chapters focuses on mainstream sports media, which quickly adapted to the new era for a simple reason: money. Many media outlets face existential threats, and gambling ads and sponsorships have provided a desperately needed lifeline. “Everybody Loses” paints the relationship between sports books and sports media as a Faustian bargain: Outlets get paid, but often at the cost of their integrity and, in some cases, their audiences’ lives. Many of the new stars of this era rose to prominence precisely because they’re blowhard shills seemingly incapable of introspection.

But in many other cases, Funt suggests a kind of benign neglect of journalistic responsibility. His writing about Bill Simmons, the longtime commentator and founder of the Ringer, is especially damning. First as a columnist at ESPN and later as a podcaster, Simmons was an early herald of the internet era: someone who gained fame because of his willingness to say things and go places pre-online sports media wouldn’t. He’s also glorified gambling in nearly all its forms for decades.

Simmons may be outspoken, but he has his limits, Funt notes. He reads ads for sports books and talks up the joy of placing bets (without being compensated for it) on a weekly basis, at least during the NFL season; in contrast, he rarely addresses sports gambling scandals, and when he does, the discussion is almost always clipped or defensive. Jontay Porter, who was banned for life from the NBA after missing shots on purpose because of significant gambling debts, was an “idiot,” according to Simmons — but Simmons shrugged off the idea that there should be deep concern about the perverse incentives now intertwined with all sports.

The idea of a virus-host relationship pops up repeatedly in “Everybody Loses.” Fans, journalists, teams, leagues, entire governments are so dependent on gambling that they cannot see the ways it’s destroying them. “One tenet of ‘responsible gaming,’ as the industry refers to it, is that people should be clear-eyed about what they can afford to lose,” Funt writes. “In that spirit, those who’ve pushed sports betting on the American public should at least be honest about its consequences.” But reading Funt, one gets the sense that there’s simply too much money at stake for honesty about the bankruptcies, divorces and suicides.

Almost without realizing it, we have stumbled into a world where each pitch, each free throw, each field goal is monetized. Gambling on sports makes you the protagonist, instead of whatever athlete or team you’re watching; your success, not theirs, is what really matters. It also leads to atomization and alienation. Sports stop being something to enjoy or share or connect you to your community, and become just another way to passively spend (and occasionally earn) money. The result is that sports are cheapened, perhaps irredeemably. The only winners are a handful of sports books that are making billions.

For cash-strapped state governments and media outlets and greedy leagues, legal sports gambling promised easy money. “Everybody Loses” makes clear that it comes with enormous costs.