It wasn’t even legal a few years ago, but now it’s pretty much inescapable.
The rise of online gambling has been shockingly quick across the Americas, raising major concerns for users of these platforms, especially younger people.
According to Statistics Canada, over 19 million Canadians say that they have gambled online. That’s nearly half of the entire country.
One of the biggest contributors to these numbers is easily sports betting.
The United States of America legalized single event sports betting in 2018, and Canada followed in their footsteps, legalizing it in 2021. Shortly after in April 2022, Ontario rolled out iGaming Ontario, Canada’s first ever platform to monitor and regulate online casinos and sportsbooks.
Once that happened, the floodgates opened. Dozens of new sites, trying to get onto as many phones as possible.
All of a sudden, sports betting is everywhere. It’s on the boards in stadiums, it’s on jerseys in the form of sponsorships, and whole commercial breaks being bought out by Bet365, BetMGM, and FanDuel among other sportsbooks.
These apps reeling in their users with casino bonuses, bonus bets, free games, and even matched deposits sometimes up to thousands of dollars.
These fun little promotions and advertisements are keen to make you forget that gambling is very addictive, and can be highly dangerous.
Make no mistake though, gamblers aren’t just chasing the money.
The feelings of dopamine and adrenaline provide such an incredible feeling to these players, and they’ll keep chasing that feeling, trying to profit a little more, and stay a little happier.
These addictive feelings can be even more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, yet there’s no laws in place to stop these overstimulating ads from hitting the screens of our young people.
XFM spoke to April Laithwaite, an addictions counsellor with the Thames Valley Canadian Mental Health Association. When asked about the regulation of sports gambling advertisements, this is what she had to say.
“They need to do more. If you look at a hockey or even a baseball game, what we’re seeing is so much gambling that it’s taking away from the actual sport, and it’s devaluing the efforts and all of the work that these athletes put in. Our spotlight should be on watching them perform their hard earned job, but we’re so distracted by opportunities to gamble that it’s taking away from the sport itself.”
Ontario banned athletes and celebrities from endorsing gambling services in February 2024, but some damage had been done. Laithwaite says the inclusion of these big ticket names in advertisements can be very appealing to younger people.
“When they’re seeing their idols or role models gambling and winning, they think if they can do it, I can do it. We look at the executive function part of the brain that’s not fully developed, and our youth can have a difficult time discerning the difference between what’s actual and not actual in the sense that very few people can gamble successfully as a way of life.”
Laithwaite finished by saying the best way to limit gambling addiction lies in education.
“Preventative is always going to be the cheapest and the most successful option, so educating our youth about the vulnerability, looking at wins and losses, and being able to talk about safe gambling versus problematic gambling, more than just giving kids symptoms and signs and telling them to follow them.”
Online traction has been built in support of further regulating sports gambling advertising in Ontario, but right now there is no clear path to that future. Betting on sports shouldn’t be illegal, but it also shouldn’t be synonymous with watching and enjoying sports. That voice has been put out to the world, and the only thing to do now is wait for an answer.
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