Good Luck Keeping Pro Athletes From Betting on Sports

Professional athletes are now playing sports in a gamblers’ world, and it isn’t going well for them. In April, the NBA banned Jontay Porter, a 24-year-old role player for the Toronto Raptors and a younger brother of the Denver Nuggets star Michael Porter Jr., for allegedly wagering on NBA games, including his team’s, and throwing his own performances to influence prop bets. Porter was the first active NBA player banned for gambling in 70 years, but he wasn’t the only athlete facing banishment this spring. In June, Major League Baseball suspended four players for betting on games and banned a fifth, Tucupita Marcano, for life. Marcano’s alleged sin: betting on hundreds of games, including 25 of his own team’s.

What were these guys thinking? How could they throw away their childhood dream—and the chance at a long, lucrative career—by doing something so reckless? Porter was low paid by NBA standards, but he had made more than $2 million and stood to earn much more over the course of his career. Marcano’s behavior is even more perplexing. Unlike Porter, he wasn’t accused of trying to fix any outcomes; he was just betting a lot—and losing a lot, too. According to information released by MLB this month, Marcano began betting prolifically on baseball games after suffering a season-ending injury last July—and lost almost 96 percent of those bets. Risking everything to make money is one thing. Who risks everything to lose money?

Marcano’s story illustrates an uncomfortable truth for professional sports: Elite male athletes are the precise demographic most likely to struggle with gambling problems. Medical research makes clear that young men have always been more prone to problem gambling; that young men with free time and easy access to gambling are at even greater risk; and that superconfident, supercompetitive young men may be most vulnerable of all. In short, as legalized gambling sweeps American sports—leagues are partnering with DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM; teams are installing betting kiosks at the gates of stadiums; and advertisements encourage fans to place wagers on their phone in the middle of games—it seems sadly inevitable that we will see another Tucupita Marcano. Maybe lots of them.

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“My reaction is: What did you think was going to happen?” Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, told me. “You just blanket the country with all this opportunity to gamble on sports. All of these advertisements, enticements, inducements. And we know from the research literature that athletes in particular have higher rates of gambling problems.”

Studies have consistently found that up to 6 percent of the population is predisposed to problem gambling. The share of young people, especially young men, is much higher. A prevalence study conducted last year at Rutgers found that New Jersey men reported problem gambling at twice the rate of women, people ages 18 to 44 were most likely to have a gambling disorder, and young men struggled to resist the allure of sports gambling in particular. It also found that people who wager on sports, as opposed to other forms of betting, are most likely to gamble often and dangerously. More than a third of sports gamblers—a category that skews heavily male and heavily young—could be classified as “high risk.”

A growing body of research suggests that, when it comes to problem gambling, young male athletes are in a league of their own. A 2020 study of more than 1,400 elite athletes in Sweden, along with 400 coaches, found that 13 percent of the men were at risk for gambling problems, compared with just 2 percent of the women. A paper published the following year in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction reported that “gambling may present specific hazards to the elite athlete population.” And according to Nower, researchers at the Center for Gambling Studies have two studies in the works analyzing athletes and coaches in New Jersey that reach similar conclusions.

This isn’t just because young male athletes fall squarely into the demographic already predisposed to problem gambling. “Athletes have a unique constellation of personality factors,” Nower said. “They tend to be high-performing. They tend to be A-type personalities. They tend to have higher risk profiles. Those are things that are associated with higher rates of action-oriented gambling.”

Making things worse, successful athletes also believe that they can win—an adaptation that’s essential to success in the world of competitive sports and disastrous in the world of betting. Athletes are prone to forming what Nower called “erroneous cognitions”—the belief that they can outsmart random chance. “You think that people who are inherently competitive, risk-taking, sensation-seeking individuals—who pride themselves on knowing a lot about sports—are not going to bet on sports?” Nower said.

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Pro athletes have one big thing going for them: a consistent, loud signal from the leagues that employ them that gambling will not be tolerated. On some level, it’s effective. Most pro athletes seem to understand that they have too much to lose by betting on sports. The same can’t be said, sadly, of ordinary young men with gambling problems, whose struggles make no headlines but can be equally devastating.

At gambling helplines across the country, counselors say they field calls all the time from young men who are desperate, and afraid, and deep in debt. “The number of men I’m talking to has exploded,” Valerie Tebbetts, who has been answering the phone for the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling since early 2021, told me. Felicia Grondin, the executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, told me that men account for 83 percent of all callers ages 25 to 34, and 100 percent of callers 24 and under.

Some of the men calling the helpline in New Jersey are so young, Grondin said, that their mothers join them on the line. Some are panicked, their voices cracking with emotion. Although their lives look nothing like the lives of the athletes who have gotten into trouble this spring, the two groups have one important thing in common: They don’t know how to stop gambling.