The Numbers Come First
In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events, according to Fortune. To put that figure in context: the North American box office totaled $8.87 billion, recorded music revenue hit $11.5 billion, live music brought in $18.51 billion, book publishers reported $14.6 billion, and the U.S. museum industry generated an estimated $16.4 billion. Combined, those five industries produced roughly $70 billion — less than half what Americans wagered on sports in a single year.
The true volume may be far larger. Victor Matheson, an economist at Holy Cross who studies sports gambling, told Fortune that the reported $166 billion figure is low because several states, most notably Florida, permit betting through tribal casinos not required to disclose their handle publicly. Florida alone accounts for somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion, Matheson estimated. Add activity flowing through prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket — which gained federal regulatory clearance and rapidly expanded into sports contracts — and Matheson puts that segment at another $50 billion to $100 billion. The true volume of American sports wagering in 2025, he said, could approach $300 billion, or roughly $1,000 in legal bets per American adult.
Handle vs. Loss
Handle is gross throughput, not consumer expenditure. Over 90% of what is wagered is returned to bettors in winnings, meaning that $1,000 in average bets translates to roughly $100 in average losses per adult. 'That overall doesn't really seem to be a crisis,' Matheson said — but he was quick to flag the distribution problem. Roughly 95% of total losses are absorbed by just 5% of bettors. 'That is a problem,' he said.
Martin 'Marty' Conway, an adjunct lecturer in Georgetown University's Sports Industry Management program and a former senior executive at Major League Baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, the Texas Rangers, and AOL, told Fortune the platforms are engineered to identify and retain exactly those heavy users. 'They're able to recognize, Hey, this person hasn't really participated in two weeks. I need to spike them an offer,' he said. The free-bet promotions ubiquitous in sports advertising, Conway argued, are designed to pull lapsed users back in. 'The best word in marketing in the history of business has been free,' he said, 'and in this case they make it appear as though it's free, even though we know it's really not.'
From $6.6 Billion to $166 Billion in Seven Years
The industry barely existed in most of the country before the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018. What followed was one of the fastest expansions of consumer activity in American history — from $6.6 billion wagered that first year to $166 billion in 2025. States that moved aggressively — New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, Arizona — are all now above $1,000 per person per year in handle, matching the mature U.K. market, Matheson noted.
CEO Times View
Free markets produce free choices, and the rapid growth of legal sports betting is, in the first instance, a story of demand meeting a newly deregulated supply. The Supreme Court's 2018 ruling removed a federal prohibition; consumers responded. That is how markets work.
The harder question is what the concentration of losses reveals about platform design. When 5% of bettors absorb 95% of losses, and operators deploy back-end data to re-engage exactly those users with engineered 'free' offers, the conversation shifts from consumer liberty to consumer targeting. Free enterprise earns its legitimacy when it competes for customers by delivering value — not by algorithmically identifying the most vulnerable and recycling them through a loss loop. The market has already voted on the product's popularity. Whether regulators and operators address the distribution of harm is the next test.
