A Rare Thing: A Sports Betting Critique That Knows What It’s Talking About

I loathe half-assed hit pieces, unless, of course, I’m the one writing them.

And mainstream media has been churning out sports betting hit pieces quicker than it takes someone in Colorado to get $500 down on the Czech Republic Pro League table-tennis match between Josef Rossler and Michal Syroha. 

Which brings me to the latest half-assed hit piece on the sports betting industry, which, I’m sorry to report, is full-assed, not a hit piece, and a damn delight to read.

I’m talking about Danny Funt’s Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, which is entertaining, well-researched, and as far as hit pieces go, pretty fair. (Not always, we’ll get to that.)

Funt is a longtime magazine journalist whose work has appeared in outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, and he approaches sports betting less as a policy fight than as a reporting problem: What actually happened once the floodgates opened?

The first 150 pages or so might as well be optioned by Marty Scorsese. It cooks. It moves. It’s basically the history of sports betting (well, the history of gambling in America, dating back to 1609 when Jamestown settlers started literally eating each other, just one of the fun little tidbits you get while reading). It zooms up to the 21st century, how PASPA got made and unmade, and reads like a who’s who of everyone in on the fight. Interviews galore — easily more than 300 of them in the book. 

There are gobs of detail and I’m pretty sure he got most of it correct. Nothing in the book jumped out as me as “wrong.” This is compared to virtually every other anti-sports betting (or at least “mildly annoyed with sports betting”) feature I’ve ever read, which are always riddled with errors. As a longtime journalist, I get it. It’s very hard to become an instant expert and write about a thing because some editor dropped it on your desk. We are, in fact, human. But it’s clear that Funt — who basically spoke to my entire Rolodex and then some — did his homework.

I’d go as far as to call the first half of the book rollicking.

On second thought

The second half is where Funt’s “what have we done here?” angles come in, but again, as far as takedowns go, it’s pretty darn fair.

Why? Because it’s nothing we haven’t written about here and others elsewhere. The RG issues. The VIP programs. Limiting winners. Touts. Live betting, micro betting, Czech table tennis betting. Funt went through all of those and more, detailing the horrors legalized sports betting has bestowed upon America.

This is where he lost me a bit, as he didn’t highlight the fact that the vast majority of sports bettors have no RG issues, aren’t VIPs, don’t get limited, don’t subscribe to Vegas Dave, don’t bet on the outcome of the next pitch, and couldn’t pick Josef Rossler and Michal Syroha out of a three-man lineup.  

Let me be very clear: A lot of the second half of the book could’ve used some “other siding.” 

He also took some pretty pointed shots at some pretty big names — Bill Simmons and Warren Sharp, among them — and clearly didn’t shy away from some of the more debatable decisions that have been made post-PASPA.

As far as regular ol’ book-readin’ goes, this is also a winner. Very easy to read, easy to follow. Funt is the best kind of writer — mostly invisible. The pace is brisk, the action flows, anecdote upon anecdote is piled on. In short, you won’t read Everybody Loses and be like, “This guy’s a dunce.” He clearly knows his stuff, clearly understands how the industry operates. 

He doesn’t present his work as a moral panic or anything like that; he just builds his case until the very last page, where his thesis — which is basically, “Was it all worth it?” — is laid bare.

Honestly, while I do believe it was worth it, I also found myself doing the Alonzo Mourning meme thing. Funt presents a ton to think about it and does a fantastic job presenting it, even if you — or I — disagree.

He also cops to placing a bet or two now and again. He doesn’t call for a ban, pretend some of the issues didn’t exist pre-PASPA, or present the operators as villains. He does, however, make a point — especially in the last half of the book — not to highlight the positives or even the non-negatives of the industry.

But as Jessica Welman, the SBC Americas editor put it on X, the book is “required reading for anyone in the industry, so they understand how sports betting is perceived outside our bubble.”

My only amendment to the above is how it’s perceived by level-headed people outside our bubble.

This book is not hysterical. It’s well done. Highly recommend.