Sports betting reshaped newsrooms, and it’s 'a little gross.' Now, here come the prediction markets.
Around this time last year, I was listening to The Athletic’s daily NBA podcast. One host recapped the week in professional basketball, ending with the news that player Terry Rozier was under federal investigation as part of a sports betting scandal.1
“Brutal,” his co-host responded. “From that, um, let’s go to our, uh, BetMGM line of the week, brought to you by BetMGM.”
The uneasy transition has been repeated countless times as sports betting and its worst outcomes — threats to athletes, cheating scandals, and gambling addiction — have risen alongside deep, profitable partnerships between news companies and sportsbooks. A new book by journalist Danny Funt, Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, tracks the legalization of sports betting and its infiltration of the mainstream. It’s a fascinating investigation into a new force shaping the lives of many Americans — especially young men.
Everybody Loses also contains lessons for journalists and news organizations. And you don’t have to know what an over-under is to appreciate the story of how fast and thoroughly sports betting has become standard fare in sports journalism.
Funt notes that one argument that led national sports leagues to become more receptive to gambling was the supposed size of the illegal market. NBA commissioner Adam Silver estimated the size of the black market as “nearly $400 billion” in a now-famous op-ed in 2014. The New York Times, ESPN, CNBC, NPR, Bloomberg, and others (including Funt himself) repeatedly published the “round, remarkable number” of $150 billion illegally wagered annually. Funt builds on previous reporting to call the estimates into question. One expert, after Funt shared the methodology, called the much-cited figures “garbage.”
I asked Funt about the online gambling phenomenon, the pressures on journalists at news organizations that make sports betting deals, and the parallels he sees with prediction markets. It’s a timely conversation; the American Gaming Association estimates a record $1.76 billion will be wagered on Super Bowl LX this Sunday — about 27% more than last year. Our back-and-forth has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to know what it’s like to work at a sportsbook, but I also wanted to hear from current and former employees about how they think about their customers and how they respond to criticisms that the betting industry is preying on people. Cultivating those sources was time-consuming, so it really helped that I was able to devote a year to reporting this book.
Beyond that, the fundamental reasons why sports leagues, politicians, and news organizations had such a profound change of heart about gambling seemed underexplored, and I was glad to get to the bottom of that in the book.
There is, as you alluded to, some value in citing betting odds for things like elections, since those odds tend to be remarkably predictive, more so than polls. That’s probably useful in moderation. The problem is that there will be pressure to promote gambling on current events of all sorts. I saw a ticker on CNN recently promoting Kalshi odds for which film will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I can see why people betting on things like that might be quite profitable for Kalshi. The journalistic value for CNN is harder to pinpoint.
- Rozier was ultimately arrested, along with a former NBA player and NBA head coach, later in 2025.