I think sports betting is obnoxious and stupid but I do worry about this moral policing some seem to want to do.
The people I know losing money to online sports betting are the same people who thought they were going to become pro online poker grinders 15 years ago.
If you got rid of online sports betting they would go play slots at the casino more and waste their money on the lottery.
If you get rid of all games of chance for money, there is a good % of people who will find a way to squander their savings somehow.
If anything, people I know waste far more money going out to eat than sports betting.
For me personally, It's not a moral thing. It's more of the militant nature of the current state of gambling advertising in the UK. It's predatory and aimed at the very people seemingly unable to have fun gambling. Those spending a little on a flutter now and then aren't really a concern of mine, it the ones struggling with gambling addictions having all this garbage shoved in their faces 24/7.
It's a case of the relative amounts and proportions of harm. Gambling is something where a small but not insignificant percentage of the population have an addiction problem - they're prone to get hooked and basically lose all their money. Now, this isn't something that's absolute: someone may be susceptible to this but not actively seek it out, especially to the extent of going to a black market bookie or similar. So the fact that it's so heavily advertised is going to increase the harm to these people.
Secondly, the bookies have a strong incentive to perpetuate this harm: much like with gatcha video games, which have the exact same moral hazard (and are exactly modeled on gambling), the 'whales' who get completely addicted bring in so much more revenue than those who occasionally gamble a little for a bit of fun, that even if they're a minority of customers they can make up the majority of revenue, and so they're going to make more money if they optimize for hooking them (there are some guardrails, to be fair: in contrast to said video games, there is a system where you can ban yourself from all the major bookies if you realize you have a problem. Probably doesn't make the ads any easier to sit through, though).
I'm not in favor of banning gambling altogether: I realise it's something a lot of people can engage with healthily, even if I have no interest in it at all. But I would be in favor of reigning in the advertising of it: it's kind of obnoxious how large a percentage of it is present in sports media anyway, even without the harms done. (I feel the same about alcohol ads, even if that is something I do like, and alcohol has a much lower moral hazard from the manufacturers in terms of hooking in alcoholics, because the ratios are not so extreme)
I never said I want it to go away. I merely said that maybe we shouldn't advertise things that commonly lead to addiction. I've gambled a little here or there and don't see any harm if it's limited and done for fun.
It might reduce the number of people who get into in the first place. But more likely and more importantly I would hope that it makes it easier for people who want to recover to not be tempted. I can't image what it would be like for an alcoholic to watch a cold refreshing beer cracked open in the types of party settings they used to enjoy during an ad, or for a gambler to see someone in an ad winning and hear that if you put $1k into an account they'll give you another $1k and other benefits.
The people I know losing money to online sports betting are the same people who thought they were going to become pro online poker grinders 15 years ago.
If you got rid of online sports betting they would go play slots at the casino more and waste their money on the lottery.
If you get rid of all games of chance for money, there is a good % of people who will find a way to squander their savings somehow.
If anything, people I know waste far more money going out to eat than sports betting.