Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Liam Cole Young, Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Co-Director of the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University
The Seattle Seahawks may have easily dispatched the New England Patriots on Super Bowl Sunday, but a more consequential battle unfolded off the field.
Sports betting companies vied with each other for fan attention, engagement and market share by flooding the broadcast with ads and promotions.
These will continue to crowd our social feeds and commercial breaks throughout the Winter Olympics. Want to wager on a curling match between Italy and Switzerland? Think someone will score in the first 10 minutes of a hockey game? In most parts of Canada, you can tap a wager into your phone from your couch in seconds.
Gamblers have already set their sights on the Olympics, but for many fans, the sudden proliferation of betting has felt disorienting. How did something once considered taboo become commonplace so quickly?
As a researcher working on a long-term project on sports gambling, I see these shifts as part of a broader transformation. Much like the forces shaping professional sport franchise sales and ownership battles, the proliferation of sports betting reflects deeper changes in the business, culture and technology of contemporary sport.
Sports betting in Canada
The sports betting floodgates opened in Canada with Parliament’s passing of Bill C-218 in 2021. This legislation allowed provinces to introduce wagering on single events, including in-game live bets. Previously, only multi-game wagers, tightly controlled by public gaming and lottery corporations through Sports Select, were legal.
Parliament was reacting to pressure from industry and consumers that had ratcheted up after the United States Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, which opened the door to legalized gambling outside of Nevada.
Today, the landscape varies across Canada. Ontario has a regulated iGaming market that allows private operators like FanDuel and DraftKings. Alberta is set to adopt a similar approach in 2026.
Other provinces maintain tighter controls, offering online gambling through provincially run platforms such as PlayNow in British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Québec operates its own platform through Loto-Québec’s EspaceJeux.
The COVID-19 moment
The timing of legalization also coincided with another seismic disruption: the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, COVID-19 shut down stadiums and arenas.
Professional sports leagues suddenly found themselves without ticket revenue, concessions or live event income. Games played in empty arenas upended our assumptions about the resilience of professional sport business models. As financial losses mounted, leagues and teams needed cash.
Sports betting companies, buoyed by private investment, were waiting with open arms and open wallets. Companies like FanDuel and DraftKings were eager to push further into mainstream sports markets and willing to spend heavily to do it.
Partnerships were signed in rapid succession that once would have been ethically unthinkable due to potential conflicts of interest. Leagues aligned themselves with betting platforms, franchises inked sponsorship deals and star athletes fronted ad campaigns.
This reflected a longer economic trajectory. Franchise valuations have soared over the last 25 years. The US$10 billion sale of the Los Angeles Lakers in fall 2025 is the latest signal that global finance, private equity and non-traditional ownership groups have transformed sports into highly financialized assets.
The new stakeholders expect steady and substantial returns. With broadcast landscapes and consumer media habits changing, owners are increasingly hedging their bets. Partnerships with gambling companies are central to that diversification strategy.
Changing fandom, changing technology
Technology has fundamentally transformed how we observe, measure, track and analyze sport. Much has been written on the analytics revolution in sports management, sometimes called the “Moneyball” effect, which has seen teams increasingly apply quantitative methods borrowed from finance in their approach to franchise operations and roster construction.
Fantasy sports and video game “franchise mode” — gameplay formats that allow users to manage teams over multiple seasons — invite people to think in terms of analytics, probability and predictive modelling.
These platforms train users to break traditional “units” such as games and teams into ever smaller, quantifiable components that can be studied, compared and reconfigured. In fantasy sports, for instance, the performance of an individual athlete may matter more than the outcome of a game.
These behaviours align neatly with sports betting, and gambling apps are designed to capture and monetize them. They transform matches into a series of discrete events and outcomes that can be wagered upon, mirroring the logic of “derivatives” in the financial sector. Users are prompted to interact, analyze, predict and react to events in real time.
As TV increasingly becomes a “second screen,” betting apps keep people tethered to broadcasts through their phones, benefiting leagues, broadcasters and gambling companies alike.
Promises and perils of datafication
Modern sports generate enormous volumes of data. Tracking technologies measure ball trajectories, player movement, speed, force and spatial positioning with extraordinary granularity. Originally developed for performance analysis and officiating, this data now fuels an ever-expanding menu of betting options.
Betting platforms analyze data provided to them through league partnerships or via third-party data brokers in real time. These data operations are proprietary and not accessible to bettors.
Fans can now wager on everything from the outcome of the next pitch to the number of yards gained on a single drive or even the length of a national anthem. This real-time micro-wagering keeps fans engaged, but it also heightens the ethical stakes. As data flows expand, so do opportunities for misuse.
In recent years, several athletes and coaches have been disciplined for violating gambling rules — betting on games, sharing inside information or associating with third-party bettors.
These cases highlight larger systemic issues: that the rules governing these partnerships were assembled reactively, often hastily, and without a clear sense of how such relationships would affect competitive integrity.
The landscape is defined by uncertainty: unclear rules, inconsistent enforcement and ongoing debates about whether all of this is healthy — not just for the culture of sport, but society as a whole.
What kind of sports culture lies ahead?
The proliferation of sports betting ads signals a deeper realignment in how sports are financed, experienced and governed.
The forces driving this shift — changes in policy, economics and fan practices; technological innovation; data and financialization; emerging ethical considerations — are the same forces reshaping professional sport more broadly.
Leagues and teams are now more directly tied to gambling revenues than ever before, raising questions about their responsibility to protect players, preserve competitive integrity and support fans vulnerable to harm.
Governments and regulators, meanwhile, face mounting pressure to balance economic opportunity with meaningful consumer protections, including limits on advertising and stronger responsible gambling frameworks.
Sports betting isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Understanding how we got here, who the players are and what’s at stake are necessary steps toward ensuring a future of sport that’s about more than the next wager.
Liam Cole Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. How sports betting is changing the way people watch sports – https://theconversation.com/how-sports-betting-is-changing-the-way-people-watch-sports-275303