Sports Betting Is a New Nightmare for Tennis Players

Half of sports fandom — perhaps more than half — is about the joy of hate. You hate entire teams of athletes simply because of the city they play for. You hate their hype, their jerseys, their fans, their coaches, their dominance. In tennis, you hate individuals. You hate their style of play (streaky, pusher, servebot) or their personalities (too boring, too angry, too arrogant). You might hate their unbearable greatness, or the fact that they always beat your guy. There is a purity to this kind of disdain. It is both irrational and very much impersonal, spawned from the same source of enthusiasm for the game that could otherwise inspire, say, a group of Carota Boys to trail their favorite ginger-hued Italian from match to match.

But a new, more pernicious strain of hate — more corrosive, more intimate — has been creeping into the game for some time. It’s been percolating in Instagram comments sections, and evident in the stands as overzealous fans scream a little too loudly for (or is it at?) the players, their intensity outsized in relation to what’s happening on the court. It is the inorganic byproduct of sports betting, which offers a financial boon to the professional tours but a specter of depravity to the culture of tennis.

In an Instagram post last Wednesday, French player Caroline Garcia, ranked 30 in the world, posted a sampling of the messages she’d received after her first-round loss to Renata Zarazúa at this year’s US Open. Some advised her to kill herself; others contained threats against her family. Most were from people who had bet and lost money on her match.

“Since social media started, fans –– in a good way –– are closer to the athletes they like to follow,” said Garcia, when we spoke by phone. “But so are the haters, and they’re able to send these kinds of comments with a DM. It’s the people who have lost money –– they get aggressive, they threaten you. Most of the time it’s after you lose, but sometimes it’s also after you win.”

Major sports leagues have partnered with sports-gambling behemoths to a degree unthinkable only a few years ago. In 2023, the chronically cash-strapped Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) announced a multiyear expansion of their original agreement with FanDuel. Meanwhile, one in five American bettors surveyed earlier this year said they lost money they needed for living expenses or lied to someone about their wager. Between 2018, when the practice became legal in the U.S., and 2022, American sports-betting platforms brought in $14 billion, which means bettors lost $14 billion. And the Verge’s Kevin Nguyen writes that tennis may be “either the second or third biggest sport for bettors worldwide, even though it is far from being the second or third most popular sport for viewers.” One reason why may be just how many opportunities a tennis match presents for speculation. Take, for example, the emerging practice of “micro betting,” which allows gamblers to wager on which player will win the next game within a set, or even whether their next serve will be an ace or a double fault. (As Nguyen points out, this is all made possible by reams of real-time data from the tours. “More data means better odds — for the oddsmaker.”)

After Garcia’s post made its way around the internet, a number of higher-profile players – –Ons Jabeur, Paula Badosa, Iga Świątek —publicly expressed their gratitude to Garcia for speaking up. (“Thank you for this voice,” tweeted Świątek.) This is, in other words, a systemic problem.

Most professional tennis players, like most bettors themselves, lose more often than they win. Players ranked well outside the top 100 can sustain irreparable damage to their bodies and minds without the seven-figure endorsement deals to make it feel the juice was ever worth the squeeze. Bettors, meanwhile, can tap screens from the comfort of their living rooms to make those athletes feel worse than they already would from the routine humiliation of persistent loss.

Until last month, 23-year-old French player Alice Tubello was one of the grinders, a gifted junior from a small town whose parents rearranged their financial lives to make her career possible. Since joining the International Tennis Federation (ITF) tour in 2015, she’s accumulated a handful of sponsors and $129,000 in prize money. Injuries arrested her initial professional progress, but she managed to vault herself from No. 722 in the world to No. 219 in a matter of months this year, winning four tournaments along the way.

In late August, Tubello touched down in Peru for an ITF women’s midsize clay event. She cruised through to the quarterfinals, where she met Dana Guzmán, an unranked college player. On the tail end of back-to-back tournaments and with little time to adjust to the city’s 8,000-foot altitude, Tubello lost the match. Within hours, her social-media inboxes were flooded with hundreds of messages from angry bettors who’d lost money on her performance, some of whom threatened to track her down and kill her.

“The people who place these bets, they don’t really look at me as a player, or at my [overall] matches,” Tubello told me. “They just bet on me because the statistics turned out to be my way that day.”

The death threats were benign compared to what came next. A few hours after the match, someone created a Facebook profile page in Tubello’s name. It included photos of her, as well as first-person updates that she appeared to have written herself. The cover photo was an image of Tubello against a blue background with “The shame of having a pedophile father” printed in large white text next to her face. This would be a way for Tubello to discuss and process what she had been through, whoever created the page wrote in its feed, including a prayer-hands emoji with their note. Nothing about the page or its content was true. Tubello immediately reported it to Facebook. The email she received in response was the same that contacts of Tubello would receive when they also reported it in the hours and days to come –– that they had reviewed the page and that in the end, it didn’t violate their community standards.

“The worst thing about [the page] was that they included a photo of my cousin,” said Tubello. “She’s 10 years old, and there was a post about how she was a victim of my father.”

Tubello spent the next two days trying to get the account removed. The person behind it remained active, engaging with her friends’ accounts as fake Alice. “So many people wrote to me, ‘Hey, there’s a page with your name on it, and we went to see it and it’s horrible.’” A fellow French player, Jules Marie, reached out to Tubello and offered to help — “He’s much more known to the public than I am,” she noted. Marie’s connections to higher-ups in the sporting world worked; within a matter of hours, the page had disappeared. Still, in an era of online disinformation run rampant, the clean-up of false pedophilia accusations can leave behind a permanent stain.

Over the last year, tennis’s governing bodies have been trying to help navigate the profitable mess they helped create. In 2023, the French Open and the French Tennis Federation (FFT) worked with AI software Bodyguard to give players a way to monitor their social feeds and comments sections to identify threats. It was a step in the right direction, but as any patron of the internet will know, the most invidious vitriol always comes via private message, which Bodyguard doesn’t moderate.

“All of this happens over a sport,” said Garcia. “We are just trying to play tennis. We are just athletes. It’s just a game.”

On Tuesday, the senior director of the ITF’s integrity unit issued a guarded statement about Tubello’s situation, and about the online abuse that is now de rigueur in the lives of their athletes. “We generally advise players not to report harassing messages that they receive,” he said. “Because it tends to prolong the harassment and that is never a good thing.” One could be forgiven for thinking the ITF’s line of reasoning doesn’t land as a convincing response to a widening crisis.

It’s not like online abuse is new in tennis. Players are used to being denigrated for their race, their looks, or their mere existence on court, beginning when they’re teenagers and continuing throughout their already-stressful careers. But the money at stake has only made everything worse.

“I don’t want the new generation to face this,” said Tubello. “It’s so difficult. It’s too much for something that I’ve chosen to do, as my passion. I started playing tennis because I loved it, and now this whole thing has touched my family.”

But there’s no uncomplicated solution to wholly resolving the problem, and there is only indication that the WTA is thinking about it with a proportionate level of urgency. Simultaneously, there is little indication that professional sports writ large are rethinking their entanglements with sports gambling. The U.S. market alone is projected to grow from $45 billion by the end of this year to $65 billion by the end of 2029.  In the meantime, Tubello is back to work; come January, she’ll play the qualifiers of the Australian Open for the very first time in her career.