Later this month, the NCAA will host its annual March Madness men’s and women’s basketball tournaments at packed sports arenas around the country.
While the Super Bowl remains the largest single-game wagering event, March Madness stands as a bigger and more widespread betting affair given its total number of participants, games and duration.
Last year, Americans legally wagered an estimated $3.1 billion on tournament games, according to several gambling industry sources. And that number is a jump from the roughly $2.72 billion bet in 2024, driven by the proliferation of legal sports betting apps and the growing number of states that now allow legalized sports gambling.
As of early 2026, nearly 40 states—including Wisconsin, though not Minnesota—now offer some form of sports betting, according to USAFacts.org, which reports that gambling “websites and apps are helping sports betting become a nationwide pastime.”
Indeed, Americans now wager more than $150 billion each year on sports, according to some estimates. Just how popular has sports gambling become? An estimated 22% of Americans, and half of men age 18 to 49, have active online betting accounts, according to a 2025 poll by Siena University.
Along with this surge in sports betting comes the growing problem of sports gambling addiction, fueled by the ready availability of wagering options, especially online and through apps, and the ways that legal sportsbooks’ games are designed to keep customers engaged for as long as possible. Over the years, experts believe 1 to 2% of Americans had a gambling problem, but now it’s thought that rate could be as high as 6 to 8% in states with legal online sports betting.
Everybody Loses
A new book sheds light on this stunning uptick in sports gambling and the accompanying addiction scourge it creates. Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by journalist Danny Funt, who is a contributor to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, explores, through interviews with more than 300 industry employees, gamblers, athletes, elected officials, addicts and others, the darker side of an industry that seems to be turning a nation of sports fans into a nation of sports gamblers.
“I’ve been a lifelong sports fan, and I always learned that the pro sports leagues would never embrace gambling, and to see how things changed, the leagues became (gambling’s) biggest proponents and sports media started to reference gambling in everything, even during games,” Funt said in a recent interview with The Phoenix Spirit. “I found that so striking, so I wanted to investigate it further, and look at how quickly it happened … there didn’t seem to be a pause in looking at whether the benefits outweighed the risks. It was such a big change, to sports, to public health, it has been transformative in so many ways.”
Indeed, as Funt’s book reports, in recent years the pro leagues have done a remarkable about-face. They’ve signed large contracts with sportsbook companies that offer 24/7 sports betting and dominate advertising during games, such as FanDuel and Draft Kings, which, according to Funt, together control more than three quarters of the U.S. sports betting market.
Over the years, experts believe 1 to 2% of Americans had a gambling problem, but now it’s thought that rate could be as high as 6 to 8% in states with legal online sports betting.
Beyond reporting on the business side of sports gambling, Funt said he made sure to include reporting throughout the book about addiction and related health topics. “Health issues loom in the background of every chapter, I didn’t want to treat it as a side issue,” Funt said. “I wanted to make clear that this is not a side angle, when thinking about all angles of the business, and how these products are designed, the consequences, etc., everyone should be thinking about the big picture and personal health ramifications.”
As the Big Book states, addiction is “cunning, baffling and powerful,” and that’s certainly the case with sports gambling addiction. “Gambling disorder doesn’t start the day somebody starts gambling,” Michelle L. Malkin told Funt in the book. Malkin is director of East Carolina University’s Gambling Research & Policy Initiative. “For some people it’s very quick, for others it can take” much longer.
Gambling is especially destructive, she says, because gamblers think the source of their problems is also their antidote. “The next win can fix your financial problems, your relationship problems, everything. You need that big win, but the thing is, it never fully comes … You keep chasing. Your brain no longer thinks rationally; your dopamine, your serotonin—all your neurotransmitters—have been impacted by gambling. Nothing can replace that high.”
Funt also interviewed Brian Hatch, an addiction counselor in Connecticut, who said, “In every recovery room, there’s always somebody who’s also addicted to drugs or alcohol. And without fail, all of them say that gambling was the hardest one to stop.”
Telling their stories
Funt’s book incorporates a number of stories of individuals who have struggled with sports gambling, including the story of a Connecticut fifth-grade teacher named Matt. He started gambling with DraftKings to pass time during the pandemic. What began as wagering $10 to $20 on games escalated to putting $5,000 on long-shot parlays, day after day—on his schoolteacher’s salary. “We’re talking well over 100K blown in a year and a half,” Matt told Funt.
Matt’s last bet was October 10, 2022. He came clean to his wife the next day, who had no idea about his gambling addiction. According to the book, Matt now has been going to weekly counseling sessions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings for nearly two years.
Funt told The Phoenix Spirit that Matt’s story is “brutal in a lot of ways, but it illustrated that someone as close to you as your spouse can be totally oblivious to the fact that you have a gambling addiction. It took years for his spouse to catch on. It points to the fact that gambling is an invisible addiction.”
The book also chronicles the story of Rob Minnick of New Jersey. As he was finishing high school in 2017, he got swept up playing daily fantasy sports when he turned 18. When he enrolled at Georgetown University, he quickly found college buddies who were also into sports gambling. Online casino games and other betting options soon followed. As he told Funt, “I don’t think I saw a basketball game without betting on it.”
Minnick’s gambling addiction was consuming “almost every available minute” by the time he left for a semester in Sydney, Australia. When he arrived there, instead of seeing the sights, visiting the beaches and enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime experience, he hung out in casinos and bars pursuing his sports betting addiction.
The last day he gambled was November 12, 2022, when he went to a casino and maxed out on a sequence of credit cards over a 12-hour binge. He started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings after that. Nearly two years later, he told Funt, “I’m working my second job to cover debts that I’m trying to repay to a credit card company that I made in one day.” Minnick also has been working for several problem-gambling nonprofits and posting videos on social media about gambling addiction, something he decided might help people, after his video explaining how odds are stacked against gamblers received more than a million views on TikTok.
Another recovering gambler, Saul Malek, who was not a part of Funt’s book, has also been telling his story. He started young as a sports fan growing up in Houston, getting introduced to fantasy baseball when he was 11, by participating in fantasy baseball leagues with his buddies. By his senior year of high school “someone found out about daily fantasy sports through DraftKings and even that was fairly innocuous, with contests against each other in our group of buddies,” Malek told The Phoenix Spirit.
After graduation, he went off to college at Trinity University in San Antonio and the gambling floodgates opened. He would bet thousands of dollars on sports, funded mostly by money he was getting from his parents. “I was 19 years old. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have income, I just had money from my parents that was supposed to be used for school and expenses.”
An eventual break-up with his girlfriend, and the constant lying to his parents who eventually confronted him about his gambling, finally led him to stop. “By the end of my gambling, I estimated I was about $20,000 to $25,000 in debt to 12 different bookies located all over the country because it was all virtual betting.” Malek started seeing a gambling addiction therapist and also now attends Gamblers Anonymous meetings.
Now living in Nashville, he also works as an addiction prevention speaker, traveling the country and speaking at high schools, mental health conferences and to a variety of other groups, and telling his story. “I was seeing so many ads for sports betting and decided someone should be talking to kids about this. It’s a big issue and it is only really getting worse.”
Sports gambling regionally
Minnesota is one of the few states left that hasn’t legalized sports betting. That may or may not change with the 2026 state legislative session.
Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, said she hopes it doesn’t change. As she told WCCO-TV in October, “We have not seen this happen in Minnesota yet. And I think part of it is that the culture of sports betting is not as prevalent as it is in other states where they’ve legalized sports betting.” WCCO further reported that sports betting in Minnesota is an unusual issue that has both bipartisan support and opposition at the Capitol. Efforts to pass a law have collapsed the last few years.
Sports betting became legal in Wisconsin in 2021 through amended gaming compacts between the state and tribal nations, allowing in-person only wagering at specific tribal casinos that operate legal sportsbooks. As of late 2025, statewide online/mobile sports betting is illegal in Wisconsin, though legislation has been proposed to allow for tribal-operated online betting.
For problem gambling help in Minnesota, here are some options: National Problem Gambling Helpline: 1-800-MY-RESET; Minnesota Problem Gambling Helpline: 1-800-333-HOPE. Text: HOPE to 53342. Chat: mnapg.org; Minnesota Alliance on Problem Gambling: 612-424-8595. www.mnapg.org.
For help in Wisconsin, here are some options: Wisconsin Problem Gambling Helpline. Call: 1-800-GAMBLE-5. Text: 850-888-HOPE. Chat: wi-problemgamblers.org.; 920-437-8888.
