Americans Are Turning Against Sports Betting—But It's Not Going Anywhere

Plus: World Cup ticket prices, Michael Jordan against NASCAR, and The Smashing Machine

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Remember this week to think of your loved ones who have passed away, even if they rooted for the wrong team.

There was lots of talk about sports betting legalization in the last week because of new survey data. We'll dig into the numbers and implications, then we'll talk about World Cup ticket prices. After that, it's time for NASCAR and mixed martial arts (but not at the same time, sadly). Let's get at it.

Locker Room Links

• Why do soccer players spit so much?
• A $1 ticket surcharge to fund home repairs in a new stadium's neighborhood is a bonkers idea, made only slightly sane by the team seeking $88 million in tax breaks to fund the stadium. This is the kind of craziness that happens when governments get involved in sports! (Full disclosure that I technically own a minuscule portion of the team involved here.) 
• Study says payments for name, image, and likeness are making college sports more competitively balanced. It helps that small schools can now pay a recruit with dollars instead of exposure and academics.
• When he was 18, Fernando Tatís Jr. signed a deal where he got $2 million from Big League Advance, which would get 10 percent of his future MLB earnings. Now that he's a superstar, Tatís tried to nullify the deal. An arbitrator didn't buy his argument.
• European soccer organization UEFA "reluctantly" allows a league match to take place in the U.S. this season. The European Union's commissioner for "Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport" calls it a "betrayal" of local communities. Meanwhile, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league has plans for a football game in Asia.
• The United Football League is moving franchises out of Detroit, Memphis, and San Antonio. The new locations might be announced this week.
• LIV Golf is burning through money, but Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has a lot to burn (which raises the question of why governments would spend taxpayer money on it).
• When rules (like NCAA salary caps) are hard to enforce, no one expects anyone to follow them (so why would you follow them?)
• Elsewhere in Reason: "From library books to abortion, gender, and even food, the culture war is now feeding the police state."
• I don't agree with everything Darren Heitner says about college sports, but this is a great take!
  

  I'm also tired of hearing we need to "save college sports." College sports is thriving. Women's athletics are experiencing unprecedented growth and visibility. Olympic athletes have more opportunities available to them than at any point in history. https://t.co/4fYRgGWROZ

  — Darren Heitner (@DarrenHeitner) October 4, 2025

Betting Backlash?

The public's vibes are turning against sports betting. But if you're an avid sports bettor, I wouldn't worry too much about it getting banned again.

A Pew Research Center survey that was recently released (but conducted this summer) shows 43 percent of U.S. adults think "the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country is" a bad thing for society, 7 percent say it's a good thing, and 50 percent say it's neither good nor bad. The 43 percent figure is up from 34 percent who said the same thing in a July 2022 Pew survey.

Society aside, the numbers are similar for sports: 40 percent say legalized betting is bad for sports (up from 33 percent in 2022), 17 percent say it's a good thing for sports, and 42 percent say neither good nor bad.

Young people are especially likely to have moved against betting: of those aged 18–29, the number of those who think sports betting is bad for society moved from 23 percent in 2022 to 41 percent in 2025. Even sports bettors' views have soured. In 2022, 23 percent of them said betting is bad for society. In 2025, this number jumped to 34 percent.

Still, only 10 percent of adults had bet online in the last year, up from 6 percent in 2022. (Betting with friends is still more popular: 15 percent said they had bet with friends or family in the past year, through things like fantasy leagues or March Madness pools—that number is unmoved from 2022).

Consider the politics of this, and why I don't think bettors or sportsbooks should be all that worried: 43 percent of the country thinks something is bad, 7 percent think it's good, and 50 percent don't have strong feelings about it. I'm guessing the 43 percent who think sports betting is bad for society have many other political priorities, and the 7 percent who think it's good are probably bettors who feel quite strongly about that.

Politicians are going to hear a lot from the strong-opinioned 7 percent. They're going to hear a lot from the sportsbooks that want to keep betting legal. In most states, there's not an organized or well-funded interest group in favor of undoing legalization. No one stands to gain all that much from reimposing bans—if bettors can't legally bet, some will turn to under-the-table methods. If those aren't available, what are they going to do with their money instead? There's no clear industry that would benefit and start lobbying or campaigning for it. Combine that with the gobs of tax revenue politicians would have to find to replace betting revenue if it went away, and the math is still in bettors' favor.

There's also not much to gain from one political party or another taking this battle on. Democrats and Republicans were equally concerned in the Pew survey, and basically the same amount of Democrats and Republicans are sports bettors.

Legislatively, the tide on sports betting is still moving toward legalization. The talk is about when big holdouts (e.g., California, Texas) will finally legalize, not which states are going to do the opposite. The news isn't all positive (see higher taxes on bets in Illinois). But long-term, bettors might just need to figure out how to convince politicians to leave them alone.

Expensive Goals

It's going to be expensive to get into the most popular sporting event in the world! Who knew?

Presale for World Cup tickets is underway, and people are not happy about the prices. The cheapest possible ticket to a match is $60 (we don't even know who's playing in those matches yet). The cheapest ticket for a U.S. group stage match is $90, and the cheapest ticket for the final is $2,030. That last number is pretty eye-popping for a list price. But trying to get a seat at the biggest sporting event of the next four years was always going to be expensive. FIFA says 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 World Cup final. Hundreds of millions of people would probably go to the 2026 final if they could. 

Some critics are upset that getting the cheapest ticket to every match of a given team, from three group stage matches through five knockout matches if the team reaches the final, will cost $3,180 (higher if one of the three host countries somehow made it that far). But if you exclude the final, that's seven matches for roughly $1,150, or about $164 a match. That seems like a pretty good deal for the biggest sporting event in the world. It's also not how the vast majority of fans follow their teams. If someone can afford to take a month off work, fly to North America, and pay for monthlong lodging and travel to various host cities, then $164 per match isn't going to be a huge expense for them.

Another common critique is that the atmosphere at matches will suffer because of the high prices. But every match will probably still sell out anyway, so I guess the implication is that people who spent more money on tickets won't be raucous or engaged in the match? That logic seems off to me. If anything, lower prices would open tickets up to casual neutral observers instead of die-hard fans.

The Athletic reported on Monday an update on the first few days of the ticket presale, after which FIFA actually raised some prices slightly: "The adjustments, the availability of tickets after 48 hours of purchasing, and exorbitant price listings on resale sites, suggest that some fans are more than willing to pay the prices that others have deemed 'astonishing' and 'unacceptable.'…The sales likely confirmed suspicions that, despite the backlash to FIFA's initial prices, they were actually an underestimate of market value and demand."

I'm still waiting for an email from FIFA about the status of my entry in the presale draw. So even with the high prices, a lot of the process is still coming down to luck—because there are still more people willing to pay for tickets, even at these prices, than there are tickets available.

Yellow Flag

If you're not a NASCAR fan, you might not know Michael Jordan loves the sport so much that he co-owns a team with four drivers (one of them part-time). The team isn't just an investment or a vanity project; Jordan seems heavily involved. It's not uncommon for race broadcasts to show him in the pits with a headset on, listening in on team communications.

Jordan is so involved, in fact, that he's trying to upend the sport.

Jordan's team, 23XI Racing, has been locked in a contentious court battle with Front Row Motorsports against NASCAR. The series has 36 charters, which guarantee a start in every race. Charters are worth millions of dollars each, and they also guarantee owners a share of NASCAR's TV money. NASCAR is a monopoly, Jordan says. They control the rules and enforcement of them on and off the track, they control the schedule, and they own most of the tracks. So when NASCAR gives tracks about 65 percent of its $7.7 billion media deal, it's giving a lot of money to itself. But so far, the courts are not swayed by 23XI Racing's arguments. There was a brief injunction, but a circuit court tossed it. Trial is set for December 1.

Jordan might not like it, but the existing arrangement is what every NASCAR owner basically knew was possible when they got into the sport. NASCAR is a business, and the teams are their own businesses but also partners that make the sport possible.

As Marc Oestreich writes in a great Reason piece: "Strip away the filings and the spectacle is absurd: Imagine Jerry Jones storming out of the NFL, claiming Commissioner Roger Goodell runs a monopoly. Yes—that's the point. Every league is a closed system. Your house is a monarchy, your office a dictatorship, and NASCAR a monopoly unto itself. That's how order is kept, parity enforced, and the game protected from chaos."

Smashed Rock

Did you know some politicians wanted to ban mixed martial arts in the 1990s? As my colleague Peter Suderman writes: "Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) called it 'human cockfighting,' The New York Times editorial board called for the banning of its 'extreme barbarism,' and the state of New York even went so far as to enact a prohibition. This sort of no-limits combat, the argument went, was not a civilized form of sport or entertainment. It was just brutality."

But it was too popular to ban. Enough people were fans of the sport to keep it off the political chopping block. Now the sport is a global success. That's why a movie about the sport's early days can draw big crowds, big stars like The Rock and Emily Blunt, and big dollars. It's too soon to say if that movie, The Smashing Machine, will be a smashing success. But Suderman was very impressed with The Rock, writing that he "is, in fact, a remarkable screen actor, capable of a kind of nuance and psychological complexity that he rarely shows." (At the very least, watch the trailer to see his physical transformation into someone unrecognizable.)

If you're a UFC fan, you might want to check the movie out while it's in theaters. Suderman warns, though, that The Rock's acting performance isn't enough to salvage the film, calling it "an uneven film that never quite seems to decide what it's about."

Replay of the Week

Extremely glad to have watched this game as a neutral who could just laugh and laugh at all this ridiculousness. (Honorable mention to Trevor Lawrence stumbling twice but scoring the winning touchdown anyway.)

The Arizona Cardinals just suffered perhaps the most hilarious loss in NFL history

- 21-6 4th quarter lead
- Fumbled crossing the goal line to go up 28-6
- Fumbled an interception for a touchdown up 21-12 with less than 5 minutes left pic.twitter.com/d6tgK0nCXt

— NFL Memes (@NFL_Memes) October 5, 2025

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Botswana against Uganda in a crucial World Cup qualifier.