It’s hard to watch sports these days without thinking about gambling. Every stadium, broadcast and podcast seems to nod to fans with some financial stake in the outcome of a match. Last year, Americans spent almost $120 billion on legal sports bets—a 28% increase from 2022.

But we’re just beginning to get our heads around the effects of gambling on sports, which has been legalized in 38 states over the past six years. This summer, for instance, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles’ Anderson School of Management published a paper that examined consumer-­credit data and analyzed what sports betting did to the financial health of the states where it was legal.

The findings were staggering: a 28% jump in bankruptcies and an 8% increase in debt sent to collection, as well as growth in late auto loan payments and weakened credit scores. “The fact that we can find anything in the aggregate suggests that the impact for individuals is quite large,” says UCLA professor Brett Hollenbeck.

On the cusp of the NFL season, we look at what gambling has done to sports media; how states are spending the tax revenue from all those bets; how gambling has changed football players’ lives—and hear from them directly; how companies protect the leagues, players, fans and athletes from cheating; why sports gambling is dominated by two big platforms; and more.

Money has always been a part of professional athletics, but this new infusion of cash is warping how we interact with sports. Some argue that betting deepens fan engagement and spreads their allegiances beyond just the home team. Yet players, fans, investors and sports journalists are all participants in a kind of risky grand experiment that’s adding billions of dollars to humanity’s great pastimes. And to think, we still call it a game.