Gambling group estimates U.S. will bet $1.8B on World Cup – as much as total U.S. wagering in a major NFL season – to $4 billion on Lotto 7 Lotto
Sports wagering is expected to grow to a total of $4.3 billion over the next five years, a study by the Gambling Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin has confirmed.
That estimate – which comes from a projection of four years of betting patterns (including NFL, basketball, and baseball) for the U.S. – is higher than the $3.8 billion that an industry report estimated would be spent on Las Vegas-style casinos alone.
The findings were presented at the Gambling Research Institute’s recent annual convention on Thursday, in Dallas. GRI, an academic research institute, aims to support policy development to make the state as competitive as possible for sports betting in the U.S.
GRI’s study is the first of its kind to assess the growth in the percentage of Americans betting that would come from expansion of U.S. sports betting, said the institute’s president and chief executive officer, Michael McCann.
“It’s a very important finding,” he said. “For a long time, we’d been focusing on the number of wagers, and not the number of bettors. What we found is the number of wagers and the number of bettors are both growing, but at different rates.”
The findings come in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last month striking down a provision of the 2009 law that banned sports betting in the U.S., in effect declaring the industry illegal. The decision paved the way for the U.S., like many other nations, to legalize sports betting at the federal level.
The number of bets on the three most popular U.S. sports categories, football ($2.1 billion in total bets this year), basketball ($1.1 billion), and baseball ($1.3 billion) already exceeded the total number of U.S. bets on the NFL ($1.5 billion), which