Pablo Torre has been at the cutting edge of reporting on how legal sports betting has infiltrated athletes and their inner circles across the NBA and beyond.
As more scandals lead to real-life consequences for alleged perpetrators in and around pro sports — including but not limited to the recent arrest of Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups in the NBA — Torre said in a recent interview that he is worried that the very nature of sports fandom could be at risk.
Not because the outcomes of games could be in question (though that is always a risk), but because of how sports leagues are reorienting themselves as businesses. Torre said on The Atlantic’s Galaxy Brain podcast that he fears that as the relationships between sportsbooks and sports teams and leagues deepen, the message to fans will be to root for their own financial fortunes by way of winning bets more so than the teams or players they are proximate to geographically or enjoy watching.
“Live sports feel real … I’ve always said sports are fascinating and, for me, irresistible because it feels like humiliation is on the line in every sporting event,” Torre explained to host Charlie Warzel.
“Someone cares deeply, someone’s ego is at risk, someone might get turned into a meme or worse. That happens in everything in sports. And if there is some loss of confidence that the stakes are not actually that, that it’s not genuine humiliation, that it’s not genuine defeat, then I think you’re really risking the cultural supremacy of the product.”
Torre likened the deepening of business ties between sports betting operators and major sports leagues to an energy company fracking the Earth for oil.
The Meadowlark Media host believes leagues are demolishing the fertile soil that made them a dominant cultural product among human beings for more than a century by chasing the fat new cash cow on the farm.
“I wonder if the leagues realize that they’re basically fracking their product,” Torre said.
“They’re creating a series of individualized, hyper-specific, sometimes microscopic sporting interests, rooting interests, that are not the same as, ‘I care about this team,’ or even this player. I think you’re just changing what the product is. The product, at its best, in the way that it’s become culturally supreme, is there are these teams, all trying to win a championship. Pretty simple. In the world that they’re building now, the product is different. They’re convincing people to watch these games not because of these teams involved or the quality of the players, but because there are these other things to root for.”
While sports betting apps are marketed as an extension of fandom and the live viewing experience, it is hard to tell how fans’ minds will be warped by years of cheering for their own, hand-picked micro-outcomes rather than the success of their city’s team or the players who give them joy.
For Torre’s part, the doomsday scenario could be a fundamental rewriting of how sports fans’ minds work — for the worse.