Sports Betting and Young Australians — How Advertising Normalised a Public Health Problem
Why sports betting and young Australians requires urgent attention
The conversation about gambling harm in Australia has, for most of the past decade, centred on poker machines. This is understandable — Australia has approximately 196,000 registered gaming machines, representing nearly 20% of the global total, and the harms associated with electronic gaming machine use are well-documented, severe, and concentrated in the communities least equipped to absorb them.
But a parallel harm has been building rapidly and in plain sight, and its primary victims are younger: the systematic normalisation of sports betting among Australians under 35, driven by a gambling advertising ecosystem that grew from $287.2 million in annual spend in 2021 and has continued expanding every year since.
The scale of the problem is now documented in peer-reviewed literature. The Australian Institute of Family Studies, Deakin University's Centre for Population Health Research, and multiple research teams publishing in journals including the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction and the Health Promotion Journal of Australia have produced a consistent body of evidence on what is happening to young Australians, how it is happening, and what the consequences are.
This article synthesises that evidence and explains the mechanism by which sports betting advertising converts ordinary sports fans into at-risk gamblers — with specific attention to the research on young people aged 18 to 34.
The scale: what the population-level data shows
Australia's own national data on gambling participation and harm, collected by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) through its Australian Gambling Research Centre, provides the clearest population-level picture.
Among Australians who bet on sports or racing in the past twelve months:
One in five young women (19%) aged 18–34 reported starting betting for the first time after seeing or hearing a wagering advertisement on television
One in seven young men (15%) in the same age group reported the same initiation pathway
Among those already classified as at risk of gambling harm, 50% reported increasing their betting after exposure to wagering advertising
Among all at-risk bettors, 41% reported trying a new form of betting and 40% bet on impulse as a direct result of seeing or hearing a wagering advertisement
These are not correlational associations that might reflect pre-existing interest in gambling. They represent self-reported causal attributions — people saying, directly, that an advertisement caused them to start or increase their betting. The advertising is not reaching people who were already going to bet. It is recruiting new bettors from the population of sports fans who had no prior gambling habit.
At the community level, the same AIFS data shows that two in three Australians (69%) believe wagering advertising is 'too common,' 53% believe it 'normalises gambling among children,' and 69% say it makes 'betting seem like a normal part of sport.' Sixty percent believe it makes sport 'less family-friendly.' These are not marginal views held by people with unusual attitudes toward gambling — they represent majority community sentiment.
The normalisation pathway: from childhood exposure to adult harm
A study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction in January 2026 (Springer) provides the most detailed account currently available of how young Australians move from initial exposure to gambling harm. The research conducted qualitative interviews with 50 Australians aged 18–25 who reported moderate or high harm from sports betting on the Gambling Harm Scale. Participants described their journeys from childhood to early adulthood, identifying the influences that shaped their betting behaviour at each stage.
The master theme that emerged from thematic narrative analysis was the permeation of pro-gambling influences into all stages of participants' lives.
During childhood, participants described exposure to gambling through three primary channels: family gambling behaviour, advertising encountered during sports broadcasts, and simulated gambling experiences — which includes both videogame mechanics and promotional free-bet offers designed to replicate the betting experience without financial risk.
During adolescence, the same three channels escalated. Advertising became more pervasive with the expansion of live sports coverage and the growth of sports betting as a sponsorship category. Peer normalisation emerged as a distinct mechanism — sports betting became a social activity among peer groups, discussed and shared in ways that positioned betting as a natural component of sport fandom. Simulated gambling increased through fantasy sports leagues, social betting apps, and in-game microtransactions with structural similarities to gambling mechanics.
By early adulthood, the combination of early exposure, peer normalisation, advertising bombardment, and simulated gambling experience had produced, in these 50 participants, gambling intentions strong enough to translate into regular sports betting — and, eventually, into harms sufficient to meet the threshold for research participation as a high-harm bettor.
The pathway is not a sudden transition. It is a years-long process of normalisation across multiple simultaneous channels, each reinforcing the others.
The advertising mechanism in detail
A separate qualitative study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction (Springer, March 2025) examined 20 Australians aged 18–24 who bet on sport at least weekly. The research used thematic analysis to identify the specific factors that initiated and sustained their betting behaviour.
Factors that initiated betting included:
Early exposure to gambling from family, peers, and advertising that portrayed betting as a normalised activity
Motivations to win money and engage in what advertising framed as an exciting, skill-adjacent pastime
Social belonging — watching sport with peers who were betting created social pressure to participate
Factors that sustained betting included:
Intermittent reinforcement — the variable reward structure of betting, in which wins occur unpredictably, is the same operant conditioning mechanism that maintains problem gambling in poker machine users
Social identity — betting became part of how participants understood themselves as sports fans
The structural features of modern online sports betting: in-play markets that allow continuous wagering during a match, cash-out options that create active engagement throughout a game, and micro-markets for individual events (next corner kick, next wicket) that compress the interval between bet and outcome
This last point is clinically significant. The research on gambling harm consistently identifies fast event resolution as a driver of problematic gambling. Online sports betting in its current form — offering hundreds of micro-markets resolving continuously throughout a live event — replicates the most harmful structural features of electronic gaming machines in a product that is marketed as a skills-based enhancement of sport fandom.
The advertising ban debate and the current regulatory position
The advertising data and the harm evidence have produced sustained public debate in Australia about whether sports betting advertising should be banned or severely restricted. AIFS data shows that most Australians support outright bans on wagering advertising during sports broadcasts, with majority support for restrictions extending to online and interactive media.
The 2023 Senate Select Committee on Australia's Gambling Industry, which conducted the most comprehensive parliamentary review of Australian gambling policy in recent history, recommended a phased ban on gambling advertising: immediate restriction on live broadcast advertising, followed by progressive extension to other channels. The Albanese government has been reluctant to implement the full recommended ban, citing the economic consequences for sporting codes heavily dependent on gambling sponsorship revenue.
The 2025 qualitative research from Deakin University (published in the Health Promotion Journal of Australia by Royce et al.) identified this dynamic explicitly as industry capture — a regulatory environment in which gambling industry lobbying, through its financial relationship with sport and media, has maintained conditions in which advertising continues at volumes that the research evidence identifies as harmful, while responsibility for harm is rhetorically shifted from industry to individual gamblers.
Young people themselves, in a PMC-published study examining youth perspectives on gambling normalisation, articulated five strategies they considered necessary for de-normalising sports betting:
Reducing the accessibility and availability of gambling products
Changing gambling infrastructure to reduce risks
Untangling the relationship between gambling and sport — identified as the most urgent
Restrictions on advertising
Counter-framing in commercial messages about gambling
The consistency between young people's own policy preferences and the recommendations of public health researchers suggests that the population most affected by sports betting normalisation has both the awareness and the views to inform better policy — if the policy environment were receptive to them.
The mental health consequences among young bettors
The mental health consequences of sports betting harm among young Australians are distinct in character from those associated with poker machine use, though comparable in severity.
Sports betting among young men is associated with elevated rates of:
Problem gambling comorbid with substance use — particularly alcohol, which is co-consumed during sports events and lowers impulse control at precisely the moment when betting decisions are being made
Financial harm producing acute anxiety — the ability to place large bets quickly through mobile applications, combined with the availability of credit-like features including 'cash advances' on betting accounts, means that young bettors can accumulate substantial losses in a single session
Social and identity disruption — because betting is embedded in peer group activity, stopping betting often requires withdrawing from the social contexts in which it occurs, which compounds isolation
A feature of sports betting harm that distinguishes it from other gambling harm presentations is the role of cognitive distortions specific to sports knowledge. Many young men who develop problem sports betting behaviour hold the belief that their knowledge of sport gives them an edge over bookmakers. The illusion of skill — the belief that one's outcome is determined by knowledge and analysis rather than by mathematically fixed odds — is structurally supported by the format of sports betting advertising, which portrays betting as an extension of sports expertise rather than a game of chance.
Research consistently shows that this cognitive distortion — the belief in skill where chance predominates — is one of the most robust predictors of problem gambling severity. It is also one of the most resistant to correction, because the intermittent wins that sustain betting behaviour are attributed to skill while losses are attributed to bad luck or outside factors, leaving the core belief intact.
What the evidence says about intervention
The research literature on sports betting harm among young Australians converges on several intervention priorities.
Advertising restriction is the most impactful single change. Given that population-level data shows a direct causal pathway from advertising exposure to initiation of betting among previously non-betting young people, reducing advertising volume reduces the intake of new bettors. The evidence base for advertising restriction in gambling is stronger than in most other health domains where advertising bans have been implemented.
Early education about gambling mechanics is demonstrably protective. Young people who understand the mathematical structure of gambling — the house edge, the role of variance, the illusion of skill in fixed-odds betting — show lower rates of problem gambling initiation. The research from the PMC study on young people's own prevention recommendations specifically identifies counter-framing about gambling mechanics as a priority.
Embedding sports betting harm in mental health literacy is necessary. Young Australians experiencing betting-related financial stress, anxiety, or social disruption are unlikely to identify themselves as having a gambling problem. They are more likely to identify a money problem, a stress problem, or a relationship problem. Clinicians, GPs, university counsellors, and community workers need to include sports betting behaviour in standard mental health and wellbeing screening for the 18–34 age group.
The pathway to help must be visible where young people are. Existing services — the Gambling Help Hotline (1800 858 858), Gambling Help Online (gamblinghelponline.org.au), and state-based counselling services — provide free, confidential support. The evidence on treatment-seeking shows that young male sports bettors are among the least likely to seek formal help, partly because of stigma and partly because they do not identify with the problem gambler stereotype. Outreach through the social and digital channels where sports betting is marketed is more likely to reach this population than traditional clinical referral pathways.
Frequently Asked Questions
At what age does exposure to gambling advertising typically begin for Australian children? Research indicates that children as young as eight to ten years are aware of gambling advertising through sports broadcasts, and that by early adolescence most children can recall specific betting brand names and promotional offers. The 2026 Springer study found that childhood advertising exposure was identified by virtually all participants in the high-harm cohort as an influence on their later betting behaviour.
Is sports betting more dangerous than other forms of gambling? The risk profile differs rather than being simply 'more dangerous.' Sports betting's structural features — continuous in-play markets, rapid event resolution, mobile availability, and embedding in a social sports culture — create specific risk pathways for young men that differ from the isolated, rapid-cycle harm associated with poker machines. Both are serious public health concerns.
What can parents do if they are concerned about their child's sports betting? Open conversation that focuses on the mathematical structure of betting — explaining the house edge and the mathematical impossibility of long-term profit — is the most evidence-based approach. Avoiding shame-based framing is important, as shame reduces help-seeking. If behaviour has progressed to the level of causing financial or relationship harm, the Gambling Help Hotline (1800 858 858) provides guidance for family members of people experiencing gambling harm.
Does self-exclusion work for sports betting? Self-exclusion from online betting operators is available through each operator's platform and through BetStop, Australia's national self-exclusion register for online wagering. Evidence on self-exclusion effectiveness shows that it is most effective when combined with counselling support rather than used as a standalone intervention.
What is the current legal position on sports betting advertising in Australia? As of 2026, sports betting advertising is legal in Australia, subject to restrictions including watershed rules for broadcast (no advertising before 8:30 PM during live sport, with specific exemptions) and prohibitions on some forms of inducement advertising. The 2023 Senate Committee recommendations for a phased advertising ban have not been fully implemented.