You missed something crucial in that Sydney Sweeney ad

Hello and welcome to another edition of Offside.Last week, everyone lost their collective marvels over an ad featuring Sydney Sweeneywhich became a civilisational debate about what a woman can do with her body, with female athletes accusing her of sending us back to the Stone Age. Men jumped up to attack wokeism or whatever they think Sweeney was critiquing. What almost everyone missed, other than the fact that Sweeney isn’t a female athlete, was something staring everyone in the face: that it was an ad for a gambling company.And gambling is the ubiquitous, omniscient, omnipresent and omnivorous elephant present in every room that sports fans continue to miss. More than a century before Sydney Sweeney tried to convince us that gambling was “Just Sports”, Manchester United and Liverpool demonstrated that gambling and sport have never really been just anything.On Good Friday in 1915, relegation-threatened United beat Liverpool 2-0 in a match so obviously suspicious that the Manchester Football Chronicle said it was “surprised and disgusted” by what it had witnessed. Bookmakers noticed a flurry of bets on the exact 2-0 scoreline, an investigation followed, and seven players from the two clubs were eventually banned for life for conspiring to fix the game.To be fair, wagering has been around since humans started running, fighting or throwing things, ever since we invented currency or competitive insecurity. But what has changed is its all-intrusive nature. As people joke, earlier the internet was something that was only available in a cybercafe or a computer classroom for an hour a day before we went out to touch grass. But today, thanks to the internet, it’s almost everywhere.For most of human history, betting was a physical activity. You had to go to a shadowy gully or a physical casino to place your bet. Even sports betting, compared with a slot machine, was a slower activity: you placed a wager and waited for the match to end.Now, that bookmaker occupies the same digital real estate as your social media accounts, your bank and the stream showing you the game.The product is faster, more granular and designed to keep you trapped.The easiest noob explanation is usually dopamine — the neuroscience equivalent of Mercury in retrograde — blamed for everything and understood by no one.Gambling does involve the brain’s reward system, but it’s not just that winning feels good. It’s the anticipation, learning and the gap between what happened and what could have happened. Gambling repeats that uncertainty. A Cambridge study in 2009 found that people who come close and lose have an increased desire to continue. The loss for the bank account isn’t necessarily a loss for the brain.A 2024 study of two million individual online bets found gamblers bet bigger after an immediate loss. Simply put, when you lose Rs 1,000, your brain tells you the next Rs 1,000 could be used to earn that money back.In 2026, the smartphone has stripped away all the barriers and pauses in which common sense could kick in. In-play betting turns a game into thousands of discrete events: the next scorer, the next corner, the next card, player props and a myriad other things.For most people who gamble, it doesn’t become an addiction. But for some — WHO estimates 1.2% of the world’s adult population has a gambling disorder — the belief that the next win will fix everything can become part of the cycle. At a high-risk level, WHO believes an average of six other people feel the ripple effect. And now we have a peculiar problem where gambling is so interwoven into sport that it’s almost impossible to deal with.Different countries have tried different approaches. Britain tried regulating it and gambling became woven into the very fabric of football, quite literally. While new Premier League rules mean the front of shirts can’t carry sponsorships from betting companies, they can still appear almost everywhere else, including sleeves, LED boards, broadcasts and the wider commercial ecosystem. America opened the door to legal betting after 2018 and watched it morph into player props, micro-markets and prediction contracts. India went the other way and banned online money games altogether, forcing companies like Dream11 to shut paid contests, though that hardly affected offshore or illegal operators.And the gambling company promoted by Sweeney is a new kind of digital chimera. Novig describes itself as a sports prediction market built “by sports traders for sports traders”, which sounds like the sort of rebranding exercise one might expect from an industry that has discovered the words punter and bookie lack the aspirational quality of trader and market.Except in this case the distinction is real.In a traditional sportsbook, the bookmaker sets the odds, builds in its margin and takes the other side of your bet. Novig operates as an exchange. Users buy and sell contracts whose prices move between zero and one dollar depending on what the market believes an outcome is worth. A contract priced at 40 cents pays a dollar if the event happens and zero if it does not, but unlike the old betting slip, you need not necessarily wait for the final whistle. If the price moves from 40 cents to 65 cents, you can sell your position before the match is over. Other users take the opposite side and the market, rather than a bookmaker alone, helps determine the price.The vocabulary follows the architecture.Bets become contracts, punters become traders, odds become prices and the whole thing sounds like a Wolf of Wall Street remake. Novig launched nationwide in August after becoming a federally regulated Designated Contract Market under the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, whose filings now include sports contracts covering everything from NFL games and college football to Premier League and Champions League outcomes.Ergo, the bookmaker became the sportsbook. The sportsbook became the app. And now the app represents Mammon’s greatest representative on earth: Wall Street.Which is why the Sweeney outrage was such a spectacular Trojan horse. For days, people argued over feminism, female athletes, wokeism, beauty standards and whatever other culture-war grievance could be squeezed out of a 30-second advert. Meanwhile, the company buying all that attention represented the latest evolution of an industry steadily erasing the old distinction between wagering on sport and trading an asset whose value happens to depend on sport. Since a lot of folks were outraged about what the Sydney Sweeney ad would mean for women, here’s what it can mean in the real world beyond asinine culture wars. The person placing the bet might be a man, but the losses rarely remain his alone. A 2025 review of 121 studies found that women were more often the family members harmed by somebody else’s gambling, with emotional and relationship damage followed by financial and health harms. Another Australian study found that women affected by another person’s gambling were more likely to have been harmed by a partner or family member and tended to report greater overall harm.That can mean savings disappearing, rent or school money being diverted, debt accumulating without a partner’s knowledge and relationships being held together by increasingly desperate financial lies. WHO also lists family violence and child neglect among documented gambling harms.None of that means gambling automatically turns men violent. But the combination of debt, secrecy, shame, arguments over money and pre-existing coercive behaviour can leave women carrying the consequences of somebody else’s compulsion long after the bet is settled.So while the internet spent days deciding whether Sydney Sweeney had somehow set women back, there was already a much less theoretical gender problem sitting behind the advert: women losing household security, relationships and, in the worst cases, physical safety because of gambling by men around them.That is rather more tangible than an imagined slight to female athletes. We spent so much time arguing about the Trojan horse that we almost failed to notice what had been carted into our city.