Dr. Jason Kido Lopez
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on sports media and is concentrated on athlete activism and sports gaming. His book, Redefining Sports Media, analyzes the conventions of sports media as an entertainment genre.
Email: Jason.lopez@wisc.edu
Twitter: @jasonkidolopez
For my previous Olympics Analysis about the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021, I explored why NBC’s coverage avoided mentioning gambling even though sports betting was federally legalized in the US in 2018. I argued that NBC distanced the Games from betting because gambling conflicts with the notion that it is a “pure” athletic event. A cursory survey of NBC’s coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games reveals the same patterns. However, what about the sports betting companies themselves? How do they represent the Olympics?
To answer these questions, I examined the home pages of three sportsbooks: FanDuel, DraftKings, and ESPN Bet. Despite variations in layout and design, all three pages offer a menu of leagues and events on which users can make bets, supply betting information for particular games and competitions, and suggest prearranged bets. All of these are ways to highlight the sportsbooks’ offerings, and therefore make it easier for bettors to find specific wagers and potentially create engagement by advertising bets that players may not have been looking for. During the fall, these pages are mostly focused on professional and collegiate football, but they can also center on major sporting events that occur every few years. For example, the sportsbooks recommended bets on the World Cup. This made it easy for fans of the World Cup to find bets and encouraged bettors to wager on the event even if they visited the site to gamble on other sports.
The 2024 Olympics were contested during a relative dead spot in popular American sports, July 26th through August 11th. The National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and collegiate basketball and football were all in their off seasons. The Women’s National Basketball Association and National Women’s Soccer League were on hiatus due to the Olympics. Formula 1 racing started its summer break on July 28th. Major League Baseball (MLB), the only major American sport being contested, was in the midst of its “dog days” with most teams being about 60% into their 6-month season. Given the state of the US sports landscape, coupled with the fact that viewership of the Olympics drew in 34.5 million viewers over the first three days, the Olympics seemed like a great opportunity for sportsbooks to create and sustain interest in sports betting.
However, perhaps surprisingly, the Olympics were not foregrounded on the sportsbooks’ home pages. Instead, MLB was represented much more prominently. All three books highlighted MLB games, offered MLB special bets, and listed MLB as a betting option in their menu before the Olympics. This isn’t to say that the Olympics were absent, simply that MLB took precedence.
One reason for MLB’s prominence might revolve around regular bettors’ play. Baseball has always been a popular betting sport and certainly there are more habitual MLB bettors than Olympic bettors. However, it is crucial to remember that all companies not only cater to existing customers, they also attempt to locate new ones. This is especially so for the newly legalized US sports betting market. All sportsbooks are attempting to capture and create bettors from a limited American public. So, they could highlight betting on the Olympics to garner interest, but they don’t.
One reason for this might be discomfort with betting on the Olympics due to its historical connections to amateurism and unease with commodification as I explored in 2021. However, it is also worth thinking about which specific bettors the sportsbooks are trying to attract. It is difficult, after all, to create a brand and product that is interesting to everyone. Furthermore, some companies might not want to appeal to everyone and correspondingly use a construction of who uses the product in their branding (Take, for example, luxury products that are purposefully advertised as exclusively for the high class.).
Another reason why sportsbooks don’t foreground the Olympics, therefore, is the contrast between who the companies are trying to attract and who tends to watch the Games. Sports bettors are largely male and between the ages of 18-34. This statistic, generated by the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association, highlights what the industry takes to be a desirable demographic. Contrast this with the fact that more women watch the Olympics than men and that the Games are more popular with older viewers.
By backgrounding the Olympics, the sportsbooks reify the notion that sports and sports betting are the domain of younger men. That’s of course not to say that the companies wouldn’t mind increased traffic and demographic diversity generated by the event, but the Olympics clearly represent an unused opportunity to attract more diversity. This isn’t to say we should demand that more women or older people bet on sports, but it is worth questioning mechanisms that maintain gender- and age-based hierarchies within the sporting domain.
