Lessons from Fan Studies for Sports Gambling Ventures
Session Title
Casino Industry: History & Culture
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation
Start Date
28-5-2026 12:00 AM
Abstract
Since the 1980s, volumes of scholarship on fandoms have detailed the ways that consumers have creatively interacted with cultural products. Media companies embraced fans as the default consumers for their products during Web 2.0. Sports media companies, Fox Sports and ESPN, attempted to migrate sports fans to sports gambling platforms and failed. Simultaneously, sports fans engaged in sports betting have often taken out their frustrations on athletes that have cost them money via their wagers. Our paper presentation reviews the work on sports fandom and sports gambling to identify the reasons for the disconnect between traditional ways to engage fans and the realities of sports gambling. Key to these insights, is that sports fandom is different from other kinds of media fandom as it is organized via “oppositional fandom” (Kido Lopez and Kido Lopez, 2017) and increasingly in “antagonist fandom” (Oates, 2023) practices. Similarly, sports gambling is a unique audience practice that while sharing some similarities with video games (Buehler, 2024) and narrative speculation (Mittell, 2015), has financially painful consequences that overshadow the social or emotional benefits of other kinds of fan investments. By cataloging best practice in sports fandom and analyzing failed efforts to translate fan practices into wagers, we delineate the limits of using a fandom to foster sports gambling.
Lessons from Fan Studies for Sports Gambling Ventures
Since the 1980s, volumes of scholarship on fandoms have detailed the ways that consumers have creatively interacted with cultural products. Media companies embraced fans as the default consumers for their products during Web 2.0. Sports media companies, Fox Sports and ESPN, attempted to migrate sports fans to sports gambling platforms and failed. Simultaneously, sports fans engaged in sports betting have often taken out their frustrations on athletes that have cost them money via their wagers. Our paper presentation reviews the work on sports fandom and sports gambling to identify the reasons for the disconnect between traditional ways to engage fans and the realities of sports gambling. Key to these insights, is that sports fandom is different from other kinds of media fandom as it is organized via “oppositional fandom” (Kido Lopez and Kido Lopez, 2017) and increasingly in “antagonist fandom” (Oates, 2023) practices. Similarly, sports gambling is a unique audience practice that while sharing some similarities with video games (Buehler, 2024) and narrative speculation (Mittell, 2015), has financially painful consequences that overshadow the social or emotional benefits of other kinds of fan investments. By cataloging best practice in sports fandom and analyzing failed efforts to translate fan practices into wagers, we delineate the limits of using a fandom to foster sports gambling.