What if social warming, but fuelled by money?
The trouble (another one) with sports betting
Let me start by saying: I don’t understand why people gamble. Where by “gamble” I mean making wagers on outcomes that you cannot control. Card games such as poker and blackjack, and board games such as backgammon, have for years been the venue for players who have bet huge amounts of money. That, I can understand: it’s an expression of confidence in your own ability, even if misplaced.
What I can’t follow is the desire to bet lots of money on outcomes that are completely outside your control. Whether it’s the landing of a ball in a roulette wheel or the progress of flies up a window or which horse runs faster, I don’t get why you’d put money on it. All you’re doing is adding some stress to your life, and almost certainly not transforming your own in any significant way. I did, for a while, spend £5 weekly on the National Lottery, letting the system choose the numbers, because the remote chance of winning big could be life-altering. But lottery spending is also recognisable as a tax on hope. And the money you almost inevitably lose goes to good-ish causes.
Sports betting, though, has become an absolute monster which is eating the brains of millions of people around the world, and especially in the US. The US legitimised sports betting in 2018, when Tony Soprano the state of New Jersey succeeded in its six-year challenge to the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which forbade state governments from legalising sports betting. The Supreme Court ruled that PASPA was unconstitutional, and everyone was off to the races, so to speak.
Officially (ie not including Mr Soprano and his friends), sports betting in the US was worth $400m in 2018 before the SCOTUS ruling. In 2024, it was worth nearly $18bn and growing at 10% annually. The stories of the harm caused by having easy access to gambling—which of course the gambling companies wring their hands over while counting the money—are easy to find: people who made bad bets, overoptimistic bets, stupid bets, wild bets, but always bets they thought were right at the time.
Nowadays, though, those bettors have a way to release their anger: social media. In particular, they can have a go at those who they feel have let them down: not the gambling companies for encouraging their misplaced optimism, but the athletes on whom they wrongly wagered.
My biggest interest in this arena, as longtime readers will know, is tennis. And earlier this week Katie Boulter, one of the top two British women players, spoke to the BBC about her experiences on social media.
Katie Boulter had just lost a tie-break at the French Open when the death threats started.
It did not matter that the Briton would go on to win the match.
"Hope you get cancer," said one message.
Another - laced with expletives - referenced damaging her "grandmother's grave if she's not dead by tomorrow" and "candles and a coffin for your entire family".
A third said: "Go to hell, I lost money my mother sent me."
The British number two's response, as she reads through them 10 days later, is a mix of despair, resignation and fear.
Boulter agreed to sit down with BBC Sport to provide unprecedented insight into the volume and nature of abuse received by players, including sharing screenshots of her private inbox.
“I lost the money my mother sent me.” There’s such a story embedded in that: the mother, either told that Boulter winning the first set is a sure thing (because betting on parts of matches—how many double faults, how many games in a set, or in cricket how many no balls or wides or boundaries or sixes—is available too), or that her son told her a bad luck story which he exploited. I’m guessing “he” because 69% of gamblers are men, and they’re also the ones more likely to be problem gamblers who, for example, bet everything on Boulter winning in two (ie straight) sets.
The scale is quite of the abuse that emerges is staggering:
Boulter believes a lot of the abuse she is sent is from people who have placed bets on her matches, given it comes after victories as well as defeats.
She says she has become better at moving on from it, or simply not looking at her direct messages, but the impact is clear. "As far as death threats, it's just not something you want to be reading straight after an emotional loss," she says. "A lot of the time you get it after you win as well."
Statistics shared exclusively with BBC Sport demonstrate the level of abuse aimed at players through social media, and what is being done to try to address it.
The figures - provided by data science firm Signify, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and Women's Tennis Association (WTA) - show that in 2024, about 8,000 abusive, violent or threatening messages were sent publicly to 458 tennis players through their social media accounts.
Sometimes the players decide they’ve had enough. Gael Monfils, the 38-year-old French player, took to Instagram to hit back at the gamblers who had bet on him to win only days after he had come off the high-bouncing, slow, gritty clay of the French Open in Paris and begun playing on the low-bouncing, fast, slippery grass in the UK. (It’s in the TikTok embedded below.)
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"This is not financial advice, but really? You're still betting on me? First tournament on grass, I play Alex Michelsen, 20 years old, No. 35 in the world, and you want to bet on me?"
"You're writing that I'm sh--, I know I'm sh--, we both know I'm sh--, and you still bet on me?" he said. "Who's the dumbest between you and me? Let's be honest."
"I'm not suffering; I'm sorry! I’ve played with a broken leg already, so don't pray for that. And also. We are in 2025, and you give me skin color [insults]. What does my skin color have to do with tennis performance? I know I look pretty! I say that because my mom and my wife tell me I look pretty, but maybe I look really awful for you."
Monfils, by the way, is 6ft4 (1.93m): anyone who felt like confronting him would get a neck crick. Though he’s not that far off Michelsen—he’s currently ranked No.42.
I wrote previously about tennis players and social media, noting how the Netflix documentary Break Point showed Aryna Sabalenka, now the world No.1 but then just one of the top 10, whose Belarusian status didn’t matter to people who held her somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
“After the match, I opened Instagram. And the first thing that popped up was, like, ‘You fucking bitch, you’re gonna die!’ Or like ‘You better die. And I wish all your family will die from cancer’ and blah, blah, blah. And you see these messages and I cannot handle it any more. This is way too much.”
It’s worth remembering that athletes are just like us in so many ways; what differs is their athletic talent and their ability to harness it. They suffer nerves before big events, and when big victories come into sight; they like enjoying themselves. Some of them like using social media, because—well, because they’re people. Boulter and Sabalenka are just trying to live their ordinary lives, off the court, and they happen to like using social media. (A lot of the current tennis players do. Some are funny, some are serious, some use it a lot, some use it a little, some don’t use it at all.)
As such, the players are vulnerable to social warming too: they get annoyed by content they find there.
But much more than that, the people (inevitably) losing money on betting are wound up, and have an easy release: the target of their ire, right there. And so you get the angry messages, and the cycle goes round and round. The consideration that sports betting ruins lives doesn’t just apply to those who do it, and those who are in relationships with them; it also affects, negatively, the people who are actually performing the sport, through social networks.
This is meant to be the bit where I offer an answer, isn’t it. But there isn’t one, because the players are just like the rest of us humans, and the humans who participate in sports betting can be particularly obnoxious. (At a guess, there’s no correlation between the amount lost and the level of anger directed at the player. People are just random.)
The one thing that tells me that sports betting is noxious, though, is this: you never hear about the players getting praise from someone who won big (or small) from their bet. Never. And that’s because the people making the bet think when their bet succeeds, it’s because they’re really smart. But when it fails, the fault is the player’s. And so they open up their phone…
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Thanks for such an interesting and sad insight into how gambling yet again diminishes us. What I'd really like to see - the social media data which categories exactly all their users by their pathology - it must be an exact science now. I always rolled my eyes when communities were wringing their hands about "why can't social media stop the trolling?". Social media identifies and grooms the trolls, that's the bread and butter of their industry. I guess from this piece human cynicism is endless.
How they manage to stay focused on the game, not just with the social media threats but with the staring and name calling during matches, is remarkable to me.