A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that US residents are growing more accepting of sports betting. A total of 66% of respondents now approve of making betting on pro sporting events legal, up from the 55% that were in favor in 2017. However, support for legalizing betting on college sports remains lower, with 50% against the motion.
The new study comes four years after the Supreme Courts’ overturn of the gambling law which limited sports gambling mostly to Nevada. The poll was conducted online May 4-17 among a random national sample of 1,503 adults.
Betting has now been legalized and made available in 30 states and D.C. In another five states, sports betting was legalized but is not yet operational. According to the poll’s results, 54% of Americans state that the increasing share of states that allow people to bet on sporting events is “neither good nor bad.” The remainder are split over whether it is good or bad, with 23% each.
However, 71% say they are concerned that the increasing availability of sports betting will lead to more people becoming addicted to gambling, despite a majority -64%- of the surveyed subjects not knowing anyone who has had a problem with their gambling frequency. About 21% of respondents claimed they have a family member with a gambling problem, while 4% have said to have a problem themselves.
The report also shows that 24% of Americans say professional athletes should be allowed to place bets on games in their league if their team is not competing, while 76% believe the contrary. This comes after the NFL suspended Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Calving Ridley for a year after he bet on NFL games.
Gambling advertising was also a topic covered by the poll, with 37% of the surveyed subjects claiming to be bothered by ads, compared to 54% for ads for prescription drugs and 25% for beer ads.
According to the survey, the most common way for people to bet on sports is among friends or through an office pool, with 67% of sports bettors having done one of these in the past five years. About half of bettors say they gamble online using betting or fantasy sports websites and apps (49%), while 40% bet in person at a casino. 12% have made bets at stadiums or arenas.
Only 8% of adults in the US have reported placing sports bets monthly or more often, and fewer than 2 in 10 (17%) say they have bet on a professional sporting event in the past five years. Among sports fans, 20% say they have made a bet. That number is basically unchanged from the 21% who said the same in 2017.
The stability in the share of Americans betting on sports since 2017 is consistent with other polling, the Washington Post says, such as an SSRS/Luker on Trends survey which found 16% of adults say they had “ever bet on sports” in data from January to April 2022. This is practically the same as the 15-16% in the results from 2018 to 2021.
Sports betting is common among avid sports fans as 48% said to have placed a bet in the past five years and 32% claim to bet once a month or more often, according to the Post-UMD poll. It also found that 62% of sports bettors under 50 have bet online compared with 26% of those 50 and older. Bettors under 50 are also far more likely to have bet at a stadium or arena (17%) than those 50 and older (3%).
The survey further found that 7% of adult ages 21-25 have said they placed a bet before they were 21, similar to 11% of all adults who said they bet on sports before that age as well. That suggests the increasing availability of online betting has not led an outsize percentage of young adults to bet before turning 21.
National Council on Problem Gambling executive director Keith Whyte said his group’s internal data showed some uptick in the number of gamblers since 2018, but not by a large margin: “It means a lot of the people are shifting from gambling illegally to legally. Within the betting community, you’re looking at frequency and spend. We suspect that is going up”, the Washington Post further reported.
Chris Grove, a co-founding partner of Acies Investments, which focuses on gambling, sports and technologies, said legalizing gambling was never going to turn non-sports fans into sports bettors: “The number of people who enter an office pool or put $5 on a game with a friend won’t move. But the US is clearly on pace to meet or exceed the performance of more mature gambling markets on an adjusted-GDP-per-capita basis”.
Original article: https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2022/07/11/63372-poll-finds-us-citizens-increasingly-accepting-of-sports-betting-four-years-after-paspa-repeal
