Celebrities who shill for sports betting are the modern Marlboro Men

A sign of how deeply sports gambling has penetrated the culture is the flock of top athletes and celebrities who have signed on as paid shills for the companies that operate legally in many states, helping to propel the explosive growth of betting platforms. Tom Brady, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx, Derek Jeter, Sydney Sweeney, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Eli Manning, Timothée Chalamet, Jon Hamm, Spike Lee and others have appeared in ads for sports books such as DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM and for “prediction markets” including Kalshi and Polymarket, which also take in billions of dollars in bets.

They present sports betting as cool and exciting entertainment without a whiff of danger. No mention of the risks of problem gambling — financial loss, psychological harm and family disruption — that already afflicts millions of Americans.

If you are old enough or a student of marketing history, this might remind you of something.

In the mid-20th century tobacco companies paid sports heroes and movie stars to hawk their cigarette brands in a campaign to portray smoking as part of a happy and healthy lifestyle, rather than as a gateway to addiction, disease and premature death.

“I’m sending Chesterfields to all my friends. That’s the merriest Christmas any smoker can have,” declared actor and president-to-be Ronald Reagan in one of these print ads. Other pitchmen included baseball sluggers Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, boxing champ Joe Louis and basketball great Bob Cousy — because there’s nothing like a good smoke to help you sprint up and down the court, right?

“It’s not surprising that that same tactic for capturing new customers and their loyalties is being used now by online gambling platforms,” said Mark Gottlieb, executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston. The celebrity endorsements for sports gambling are “inherently deceptive in the way that they normalize this as a fun and safe product,” he said.

You will not hear “You’ve got to be careful if you get into it,” said Dr. Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program. “For some people it can be exceptionally harmful and problematic.… Nothing leads people further to emotional pain than financial pain,” he said. “There’s nothing like losing a ton of money to create more shame and embarrassment.”

Back in 1950, athletes’ salaries were fairly modest and many players took a job in the offseason to make ends meet. They might really have needed the tobacco dough. With the net worth of many recent stars in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s hard to imagine them facing similar straits.

LeBron James, reputed to be a billionaire, has moved on from a partnership with DraftKings to a new deal with Polymarket reportedly worth $15 million. In “Welcome to Polymarket,” a star-studded commercial set in a Polymarket office, James calmly observes a scene of pandemonium, with flying footballs and thudding bodies and brief glimpses of one famous face after another. The spot ends in a delirious, confetti-fogged celebration as a voice shouts: “Win! Win, win, win, win!”

In earlier times, when fame and notoriety meant two different things, the fear of reputational harm from promoting an unsafe product might have carried more weight — though plenty of celebrities were willing to take the risk by putting avarice over prudence. Today, the appearance of greed doesn’t carry much stigma.

The Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 to lift a federal ban led to the current stampede. Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia have since approved online sports wagering. Even in the remaining states, including California, anyone with a smartphone has 24/7 access to betting sites. Legalized gambling now enriches a consortium of three powerhouse industries — not only the sportsbooks and prediction markets but also their active partners in the pro sports leagues and major sports media. That’s why you can’t watch a ballgame without being repeatedly reminded to bet. A recent survey found that more than half of men age 18 to 49 have an account with an online gambling platform. It’s no surprise that calls to gambling helplines have shot up too.

Gone are the restraints of simply betting on the winner or the point spread. Using artificial intelligence and stats provided by the sports leagues, gambling platforms now offer swarms of microbets, allowing gambling throughout the game on such granular details as the velocity of the next pitch or whether the player will get a hit this time — ramping up the speed and intensity of the gaming experience and the potential for significant losses. “These are much more dangerous gambling products than ever existed before,” Gottlieb said.

The industry’s celebrity promoters do not admit the slightest danger, any more than did the cigarette ads of 75 years ago. Since the tobacco companies proved themselves masters at getting people to do something that was very bad for them, their marketing strategies have drawn considerable study and, as in the present case, imitation.

Stanford University archives hundreds of ads of beaming athletes and actors, cigarettes in hand. To the modern eye, the images are gawk-worthy — seeming preposterous or even a form of dark humor, given what we know about the harms of smoking. By contrast, while online gambling, like smoking, has grown wildly popular, its long-term societal impacts are still being learned. The day may come when, in weighing up the damage, we look back on the celebrity hype with a similar sense of surprise and disdain.

Myron Levin is a former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He founded and edited FairWarning, a nonprofit investigative news organization, and wrote and directed the documentary “Power Trip.”