[특파원리포트] America sick of sports gambling

How many seconds does it take to sing the US national anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’? Country singer Reba McIntyre, who sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl, the NFL championship game in February, finished the song in 95 seconds. There was a gamble again this year over how long the national anthem would be sung at the Super Bowl. When gamblers bet on the length of a country, dividends are formed based on a certain period of time.

In addition to the length of the national anthem, bets were placed on how long the word ‘free’ was sung in the middle of the anthem and the word ‘brave’ at the end. Bets were placed on the color of the hat McIntyre would wear (she did not wear one), and bets were also placed on which player of the national anthem would be shown first on the screen. Bets of various kinds poured in only on countries that were not directly related to the game. Betting is mostly done on illegal sites.

I recently had the opportunity to talk about sports gambling in the United States with an acquaintance in Washington. The story of the American professional baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) opening game in Seoul became a hot topic, followed by the story of Shohei Otani, and then the story of Shohei’s interpreter’s sports gambling story. An acquaintance of mine who worked as a criminology professor at a university in Pennsylvania for 40 years and currently works at a consulting firm said that his son in his 30s is addicted to sports gambling. His son, who lost thousands of dollars on Super Bowl bets, said he has recently been spending thousands of dollars on the National Collegiate Sports Association (NCAA) tournament, known as March Madness. When asked if America’s gambling problem was something new, like Las Vegas casinos and Kentucky horse racing, he shook his head. He said sports gambling is a serious social problem in the United States and is consuming America’s youth.

Sports gambling is not a personal aberration for Shohei interpreter. America’s sports gambling problem has become as much of a problem as the drug problem. The American Gaming Association (AGA) announced that according to a survey conducted ahead of the Super Bowl, 67.8 million Americans are expected to bet on the Super Bowl game. That means one in four Americans gamble on sports. AGA predicted that only 28.7 million people, less than half of those who participate in gambling, will use legal U.S. gambling sites. He added that more than half of people will bet through various ‘dark channels’ such as illegal online sites, overseas gambling sites, and private companies.

The bigger problem is that the number of young gamblers in their 20s and 30s is rapidly increasing. The National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) announced in a recent survey that three out of four American college students responded that they had gambled in the past year. It is estimated that 2 to 3 percent of American adults have a gambling problem, and research suggests that the number may reach up to 6 percent among college students. Gambling problems are serious not only among those in their 20s and 30s, but also among middle school and high school students. Gambling treatment centers in each state have been reporting an explosion of treatment counseling calls since 2018, and one in three counseling calls are from young people under the age of 25 or their parents.

It has been only six years since sports gambling in the United States grew rapidly. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a de facto legalization ruling in 2018, leaving each state to decide whether to allow sports gambling. And each state rushed to legalize sports gambling. There has been criticism that gambling businesses are being legalized to make up for the tax revenue shortfall caused by the novel coronavirus infection situation. Currently, 38 of the 50 U.S. states allow sports gambling, and 5 of the remaining 12 states are considering legalization.

The sports betting market is growing day by day, and sports betting advertisements have gone beyond sports stadiums and penetrated college campuses, taking over TV and online advertisements. In a survey of 16- to 25-year-olds in New Jersey, which was the first state to legalize sports betting, seven out of 10 said they had seen gambling ads at least four times in a week. This is the real face of capitalist America.

Park Young-jun, Washington correspondent

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