Everybody Loses

Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling (2026) by Danny Funt

Genre: Investigative sports journalism tackling the most pressing issue touching sports now and going forward.

Recommended For: Someone who wants to read the most important sports book of this decade.

Read here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

I couldn’t tell you the exact year, though I could probably figure it out if I thought about which college football games I lost the most money on. You remember the losses. Baker Mayfield was definitely involved. He won me a lot of money. And then he lost me a lot of money. And that was in the same game.

It was before gambling was legal. My friend and I had a bookie, who operated through a phone app. So, I had a preview of what it was like nowadays. But the cash was hand to hand.

A key point here is that I was poor. Maybe it’s not as central to this discussion as I (or you) might think. A poor person and a rich person can sort of just gamble next to each other and if they both have the bug, they’ll both make the same choices relative to what they can afford. But being poor was certainly a factor in a lot of other areas of my life, so it feels relevant in this anecdote that is no small part about money.

At a certain point, an envelope is necessary, and that’s a really, really scary moment. You chased losing bets, and you passed the point where you can reasonably Venmo your friend an amount he can pay the bookie, in addition to whatever amount he already lost. So, you go to the bank, and you withdraw the amount, and you have a certain number of hundred-dollar bills in an envelope, and that envelope now has more money in it than what is in the same bank account that you just drew from.

At the time, I was basically couch-surfing. I played pick-up basketball once a week not far from the suburb that my sister and brother-in-law and baby nephew lived, so I would always spend a night or two there after that. They had put the baby to bed, and I was sitting on the couch in the dark, thinking about how I let it get that out of control.

The regret sits in your stomach. It feels like the drop in a rollercoaster, but it’s not sudden. It lingers. If you’re smart, you’ll try to thread the needle between regret (the thing that theoretically helps you learn a lesson) and shame (the thing that sends you into a darkness that is intensely deep).

From what I understand about illegal bookies, I probably could have just not paid up.

The way most illegal bookies operates probably could have served as a lesson - a foreshadowing even - for legislators, professional sports leagues, and everyone else who had their hand in legalizing sports gambling. I have always heard that, despite what you’ve seen in movies, illegal bookies don’t break your legs when you don’t pay up. Their business model doesn’t run on the threat of punishment in order to be paid. The motivation to pay is simple: If you don’t pay, you can’t keep betting.

That’s pretty astonishing when you stop to think about it. If you can more or less let someone get away with not paying you, knowing full well they won’t call the bluff because they want to keep coming back, it’s because you know the thing you are selling is addictive. That’s what we legalized in so many states.

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I almost want to skip the conversation on whether or not I think Everybody Loses is a good book (I do think it is quite good). It’s more urgent for me to communicate that it’s a necessary book. I would argue it’s the most important sports book of this decade.

The general approval rating of Draft Kings and Fan Duel among normal people is probably pretty negative, but in a sort of obvious way. Some of us participate in it. Almost all of us find its ubiquity in sports annoying. Most of us see it as a net negative but just accepting that fact is enough to sort of not investigate any further, the way people can kind of say “politicians are corrupt” and then not follow their local races or propositions.

In Everybody Loses, Funt investigates legalized sports gambling from every possible angle (the legislators, the sportsbooks, the athletes, the leagues, the gamblers, and more) and reveals way more details than the bullet points you might have brought to a previous conversation about the subject.

Ultimately, the book will piss you off. The insidiousness of the sportsbooks like Draft Kings and Fan Duel is shameless and objectively unethical. Not only is it predatory in nature the way they seek out potential addicts, nurture their addiction and then come as close as they possibly can to forcing them to bet, but they limit the accounts of people who are good at betting. Anyone with too much success will be deemed a “professional better” and be told that the app is only for entertainment purposes and their accounts will be limited to, say, $3, per bet. Meanwhile, they are bleeding middle school teachers for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Funt gets dozens of interviews with high level, global experts, including former employees at Draft Kings and Fan Duel. He paints a grim picture of the finances of this entire racket. He exposes the flaws in the logic that legalized gambling is an asset as tax a generator (among many other points, this is not found money; it’s money that is coming out of citizens who are hurting their ability to put money into the economy). States that have legalized sports betting and don’t require in-person betting also have higher rates of bankruptcy, debt loan consolidation, debt collection and auto loan delinquencies.

We haven’t even gotten into the unbelievably grim numbers involving suicide ideation among gambling addicts, which is reaching staggering levels among American youth.

Combined, the sources in Funt’s book create what seems to be a couple inevitabilities based on the path we are currently on. One of those involves an aggrieved better killing or attempting to kill a professional athlete. Another involves a massive betting scandal that a professional league may never regain its integrity from. The latter is obviously a preferred outcome.

I can’t recommend the book enough. If you watch sports more than once a week, you should read it. The first 75 pages or so are made up of some necessary stage setting and context building, but by the time you’re halfway through the book, you’ll be riveted.

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Gambling addiction does rewire your brain. You can call someone irresponsible for gambling, and you’d be correct, but you think differently when the bets are swirling around in your head. I’ll give you an example.

When I was deep in it, I remember being in the passenger seat, and driving by a field where someone was mowing a giant field that was probably going to take him hours, in the heat. It looked extremely unpleasant.

I remember thinking, “He should just pick a good game and bet on it. It’s not worth it.”

If you’re not new to this newsletter, I won’t make any assumptions about whether or not you think I’m stupid or smart, but I’d be willing to guess you’d at least say I’m a relatively measured person, based on my writing. That’s not the way I think through things. I’ve worked very difficult jobs for low wages before and since then. And the crazy thing is, I’m a pretty savings-obsessed person. I constantly worry about my future. I have a savings account for vacations, a savings account for my baby son, a savings account for our house, an “emergency” savings account, a Fidelity savings account that supposedly earns more money for me, and I contribute 12% to my 401k. Besides food, I pretty much never buy myself anything.

But your mind warps when you gamble. Like I said before, I probably could have gotten away with not paying off that big gambling debt, but I might have needed that rock bottom. The shame of the person-to-person hand-off is something you don’t get with the legalized over-the-app credit card sprots betting. You can just keep going with no one you ever have to look in the eye to hold you accountable. People can keep it from their own families for months, gambling away their children’s futures.

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Like a lot of progressive people, I approached sports gambling from the perspective that prohibition is never the answer to anything. I think that’s ultimately too simplistic of an approach, as it seems the legal market has proven to be more predatory than the black market.

There’s a hack writer who has been allowed to write for prestigious publications for years and flippantly dismisses the dangers of gambling in sports. He never does any real research. He sort of just writes on vibes. I finished reading Everybody Loses and felt that people like him should be ashamed of themselves. The book radicalized me in a way, even though I already knew Draft Kings and Fan Duel were probably evil companies. The regulations that need to be placed on the legal gambling market are massive and urgent. I’ve come to be cynical of even progressive politicians who stump for legalized gambling, thinking they are, at best, too lazy and stupid to do baseline research or, at worst, deliberately planning to receive kickbacks.

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That same friend and I who had the bookie still gamble on sports occasionally. I think we have come out the other side of being enablers to each other to being accountable to each other just by virtue of both having seen all sides of this ugly stuff.

We both pretty much exclusively gamble if we are hanging out together. At 36 years old, it’s like clarifying that irresponsible youth is still a vivid memory. We used to share an apartment and work at bars and gamble and drink too much and do all sorts of stupid stuff. Now we both have a kid and boring jobs, and I haven’t had a drink in nine months (literally as of today as I’m typing this). So, losing $50 on a game is more nostalgic than anything else. I might be mad about it. But we’re never going to spiral so aggressively in a way that I thought was a unique feeling. It turns out it’s happening constantly all over the country on apps. New users getting hooked and then chasing losses to the tune of thousands of dollars. It’s happening tonight, almost definitely to someone you’ve spoken to before.

I’m susceptible to gambling addiction. There’s no doubt about it. It’s crazy to say thank God it was illegal bookies who got their hooks in me first. If it was the NFL and NBA peddling this stuff straight into my veins before I had any experience with my compulsions, I really can’t say how far it would have gone.

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