Has our inability to satisfy our declining attention spans led to the gamification of every moment of the game?
When I attended my first New York Knicks game earlier this year, the friendly concession stand attendant who handed me a $17 beer before tip-off asked if I wanted to place a bet on FanDuel. The mobile sportsbook had gone live only a few days earlier, after New York became the 18th state in the nation to legalize online sports betting. Still, the question surprised me. I wanted to say that I came to Madison Square Garden to watch the game, not to place a bet. After nearly a decade in New York, I had adopted the lower-ranked Knicks as my team and hoped to build with them the same reverent and unbearable loyalty I had for my hometown team in Baltimore. This, it seemed to me, was a birthright and the most dignified form of fandom, unencumbered by capital or wins and losses.
It didn't take long for these beliefs to break down, and within a week I had squandered my $50 FanDuel registration bonus. Since then, I have squandered even more.
If you've watched even a few minutes of a sporting event in the last year, you've seen the commercials; FanDuel's parent company reportedly spent more than $863 million on sales and marketing in fiscal year 2021. In one ad, Jennifer Coolidge plays "Lady Luck" and tries to smuggle a leprechaun through airport security checkpoints. (The other is for realists, assuring users that they can always cash in if they think a bet might not work out. But the FanDuel spot you've most likely seen is the one that makes the strongest case for depositing your money in this dangerously user-friendly app.
The commercial also rests on the startling premise that "sports are often boring."
The ad's seductive premise is that the experience of watching sports is made more fulfilling by creating more financial stakes and betting money on as many elements of the process as possible: which team wins at the coin toss, which team is leading at halftime, whether Steph Curry will make five or more 3-pointers. Combining all of these results in footballbettingchampion.com.
The commercial itself is a dizzying supercut of clenched fists and jittery knees, a vision of modern sports fandom where the center of the action is not on the field or court, but on mobile devices. One man's eyes widen as he stares at his smartphone, indifferent to the game of billiards he is playing with a friend. Another kisses the screen of his smartphone in celebration. Another man restlessly shakes his body while his hair is combed in a barbershop. As the ad suggests, your bet is that even the salon may be a place of fulfillment.
But the commercial is built on the startling premise that sports are often boring in their own right, as FanDuel promises to "make American entertainment feel less like a never-ending stream of time," and two spectators at a baseball game, one with a cartoonishly long beard You can see them. Pro golfer Jordan Spieth appears, ready to sink an easy putt: "More Golf .... More golf at ......." and when the narrator begins to speak, he respectfully and politely mumbles a few words. The solution to this boredom-the solution to the inability of sports to satisfy our attention spans and modern expectations to somehow engage with everything we see-is, as the narrator suggests, "every drop, jab, hook, hit, steal, save, knuckle, meet" gamification, providing greater and more rewarding interactivity that fantasy sports have never been able to do.
The penetration of these platforms into the sports experience is not limited to advertising. The N.F.L., for example, was outspokenly opposed to legalizing online betting until the Supreme Court overturned a federal ban in 2018 that had been banned in most states. Last year, however, the league announced partnerships with three different sportsbook companies. (In March, wide receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended for the upcoming season for betting on N.F.L. games.) Experts now advise gamblers on betting during N.B.A. pregame shows, and betting lines appear on screen during television broadcasts Increasingly, betting lines are also being displayed on the screen during TV broadcasts. At one point, Uber Eats offered gift cards for betting at Caesars. Every Thursday, FanDuel's half-hour program "More Ways to Win" can be streamed.
The studio setup is familiar, but the operation itself is ungainly and more akin to CNBC's stock market coverage than a typical sports show The FanDuel experience is less communal and more customized, and the show is more about the bets and the betting, not the betting itself. I enjoy watching my roommates win money on their own wagers, but more often than not, it reflects my own failures.
In the film "Uncut Gems," set in the gray market era of 2012, Howard Ratner, a gambler and jeweler, takes a duffel bag filled with $155,000 to bet on the Celtics to win Game 7 of their playoff series against the Sixers in three straight games, He chartered a helicopter to fly his mistress from New York to Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. More recently, he had to lift one thumb finger to lose $10 on a five-way parlay. Sports gambling used to be associated with casinos, money exchanges, and smoky back rooms where college football was shown on CRT televisions. As well as the telephone, pornography, political advocacy, and many other things I once had to find or wait for myself.
Growing up, my father would sometimes ask me if I thought the Baltimore Ravens would win their next game. I never wanted to answer: the very act of predicting seemed to have karmic consequences that would offend the football gods. Like organized religion or dieting, a passive but sustained commitment to one's favorite franchise feels noble and we expect to be rewarded accordingly. For me, this is faith and fandom itself.
But a few clicks and a little cash can make that commitment meaningless. You don't have to bet your mental health on your team winning or losing. It's a game of controlling the terms of engagement, adjusting loyalties on a nightly basis. There have never been so many ways to win in the history of mankind, FanDuel says. And what a strange relief it is when you can't get out of the Knicks.
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