The gambling firms might have celebrated too. Historic upsets of that magnitude don’t come around often, but when they do so at the start of a month-long “festival of football,” they whip up an adventurous spirit among fans just at the right time. After all, as a marquee competition extending across 64 (now 104) matches, the FIFA World Cup is the largest multi-game sports gambling event in the world.

The fact it is staged on a quadrennial basis only adds to its allure as a recruitment ground and a ‘gateway’ event that draws in new punters. Successive World Cups have supercharged operator revenues, with the 2018 edition in Russia generating a total global gambling turnover of 120 billion pounds ($210 billion Canadian) — and the 2026 edition in the United States, Canada and Mexico primed to set new records.

Yet there are practical reasons why a World Cup betting spree is inadvisable. For a start, there are teams from across the world, all of which only play together for a handful of competitive fixtures each year. That is a small sample size to extrapolate any shrewd tactical observations that might translate into an edge for the punter.

Then there are more fundamental reasons why you are unlikely to gain an edge today, and they go beyond smart odds and insider info. To really understand the vast competitive advantage that gambling brands hold, it helps to rewind the clock back a decade to a time when they began not only re-engineering the design architecture of their products, but embracing marketing tactics that merged the psychological tricks of the casino trade with sports gambling in a digital age.

Whether you call it a digital revolution, an attention economy, or an AI-led apocalypse, the first thing you need to understand the meteoric growth of modern-day gambling is to understand that it isn’t a story written exclusively by the gambling industry. In fact, there’s reason to believe they are not even the chief architects of their own success, which mirrors the timeline that saw the five so-called FAANG companies from the west coast of the U.S.A. — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google — create entire new paradigms of behavioural modification. That part of the story thus belongs to the Big Tech giants of Silicon Valley — the single greatest creator of corporate wealth in history.

To grasp the unparalleled advantages that Big Tech granted the gambling industry, it helps to consider how the smartphone unlocked new frontiers of commercial intrusion in our private lives. Probably the most seductive mass-market technology ever invented, it nested a century’s worth of technological discovery in a single device, offering a solution or shortcut to most everyday tasks, an instant answer to every question and an app tailored to our every need and desire.

While many of us think we’re in control, few of us realize the extent to which we’ve allowed our lives to be channelled through our smartphones, and beyond that, to an endless array of portable devices that blur the lines between work and play, plugging us into a seamlessly networked digital ecosystem designed to keep us glued to our devices and dependent on a cycle of reward and affirmation.

The side-effects shouldn’t be underestimated. According to Adam Alter, author of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked,” growing numbers of us now admit to feeling a “quietly destructive” compulsion to check, click, swipe, scroll and refresh — whether that be on one of the many social media platforms or checking live score updates from a gambling app.

For cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, the smartphone is “the cult object of digital domination,” a “subjugation device” at the heart of what has become a “burnout society.” Rana Foroohar, author of “Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech,” goes as far as to argue that the smartphone resembles a pocket-sized casino in the way it hijacks our attention and hooks us on the same feedback mechanisms that made the slot machine so dangerously addictive. It is simpler than you might think too.

As every first-year psychology student will know, it is grounded in the behavioural science of B.F. Skinner, who discovered in experiments on lab rats that anticipation and uncertainty are key to the brain’s reward system, and that addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable. In short, when a food pellet was given consistently — say, every three pulls of a lever — the rats were content. But when a variable reward schedule was introduced — say, after one pull, then after four, then after six — the rats would not stop pulling the lever. Their brains, it transpired, released far more dopamine when the reward was uncertain. Subsequent research has shown that humans are similarly susceptible to such primitive psychological triggers.

Back in 2012, a cultural anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Natasha Dow Schüll, published a book that was primed to make her public enemy number one in Las Vegas. Based on over 15 years immersed in every corner of the casino world, “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” forensically dissects how the entire architecture of the casino, from the technological mechanics of slot machines to the alluring environment of the casino floor, are strategically engineered by an array of game designers, sound technicians and marketers to reel people in, prolong their consumption and convince them to act against their own interests.’

A decade on from “Addiction by Design,” it is the adaptation and spread of Skinner’s variable reward mechanisms, once unique to the casinos of Las Vegas, in the design of an entire digital ecosystem that Schüll flags as the most profound shift in favour of gambling brands today. “We’ve all felt that experience of spending too much time or too much money and not being able to self-stop,” reflects Schüll, who draws a straight line from social media platforms and the app economy to gambling apps in that they “employ the same design tricks and forms of gamification to reduce friction and remove us from a position of mindful choice-making.”

Not that we notice, of course. That’s the thing with the dark arts of behavioural modification in a digital age: it operates completely by stealth. Because we don’t understand it, we don’t perceive an initial threat and hence let down our defences. And what’s scary is that this cognitive capture is only the first pillar of the business model. Key to understanding how it works is “time on device,” a term coined in the casinos but adopted as a general proxy for profitability now that holding our attention is the focal point of almost every gambling business model — and the first step on the path of incentivized consumption.

What this did for the gambling industry is difficult to overstate — it was a cheat code for a game they were already winning.

Like it or not, we are emotional beings liable to lapses in concentration, errors of judgment and distortions of memory. What’s worse, technology often amplifies this fallibility. As Jamie Bartlett, author of “The People vs. Tech,” cautions, the internet is an emotional medium which not only accelerates how we access information but may be changing the way we think — making us even less rational and more impulsive.

Sports fans may be more susceptible to all of this than most. Part of this is because fandom is often irrational, raw, even tribal. Millions of us form deep affinities at a young age and go our entire lives supporting a particular team or idolizing athletes whose names are chanted, and achievements celebrated, with a reverence otherwise shown only to war heroes and deities. It’s much more than a game, as the saying goes, because the psychology of fandom, even the success of our team, is intimately bound up with self-identity, even self-esteem, as well as community pride and belonging.

The trouble is that gambling firms know this — and have done for a long time. In their consumer modelling, there’s no such thing as an unbiased sports fan free of nostalgia, superstition and blind hope. Any effort to objectively predict the outcome of a particular fixture is, then, forever in danger of being sabotaged by our mind’s eye, which happens to be looking through rose-tinted spectacles.

Because of this, most bets we stake are passion plays undermined by a range of primitive psychological flaws, the first of which is our ego. According to the “male hubris effect,” young men are particularly susceptible to the idea that they are using their intelligence to get ahead. Sports gambling indulges this ego trip by promoting the idea that we bet based on skill and knowledge rather than pure chance.

Dr. Steve Sharman, research fellow in the Department of Addiction at King’s College London, is an experimental psychologist who also happens to be a lifelong football fan — a Derby County supporter — who enjoys a casual bet. He freely admits feeling many of the phenomena he studies impacting on his own behaviour. He explains why it’s an alluring trap that many fall into: “We all know theoretically that playing the lottery or a game like roulette is based on chance. But when we bet on football, there is so much information that we can consume and study, including the form of the home and away teams, as well as that of the key players, etc. Fans also have a sense of intuition about their team and make judgments based on their own perceived knowledge of the sport, the fixture, the players.”

It’s easy to see how sports betting is sold as a “no-brainer” extension of all this — a monetizing of knowledge you already possess. It even plays on the same competitive spirit of sport, imploring you to ‘put your money where your mouth is’ by pitting your wits against other fans or the gambling firms. For those who are already fatefully invested in the drama of live sport, all of this can be seductively sold as a “natural” raising of the stakes, taking your fandom to the next level.

For many of us, this is a short-lived experiment that peters out after a few humbling early bets that fail to deliver the affirmation we sought. But for those who experience the feel-good factor of a winning bet early on, the dopamine hit is laced with an affirmation of ego that is a powerful reinforcer of behaviour. This is psychologically significant because it taps into the masculine undercurrents of fandom, establishing a positive behavioural association that also feeds into the competitive posturing of a wider fan culture or lifestyle where “bragging rights” matter. This distinctly masculine bravado means that losing bets, and losing streaks, often remain undisclosed or selectively erased from memory.

“The skill acquisition theory of all this is really interesting,” explains Sharman, “because when you apply a set of cognitive processes to betting on sport and it goes your way, it is a powerful reinforcer of behaviour. It feeds into an illusion that you’re in control.” This illusion of control is a psychological trap that Sharman considers to be particularly effective in turning sports fans into keen gamblers. What’s more, he explains, is that it’s not even contingent on winning. Even when you narrowly lose a bet where your sporting knowledge was a key factor, it’s easy to believe that you’re getting better or closer to your ultimate goal.

Admittedly, I was one of the fans who watched Saudi Arabia shock Argentina at the 2022 World Cup and felt empowered to check the odds for the day’s other games. My curiosity was certainly piqued when I spotted a promoted betting opportunity for the evening fixture between France and Australia: “France to win 3-1 and Kylian Mbappé to score first” at enticing odds of 35/1. Elsewhere, the same bet was priced at an even more tempting 43/1. And they were offering a 10-pound “free bet” even if one leg let you down.

My intuition pointed to a one-sided affair. France were the reigning world champions and had a star studded team spearheaded by arguably the best player in the tournament, Kylian Mbappé.

The Aussies, by comparison, were lowly ranked, and lacking in stardust. I could only name a handful of their starting 11. All this meant that I couldn’t see anything other than Mbappé tearing their defence to shreds. Until, that is, a little digging revealed that the French defensive linchpin, Raphaël Varane, was unlikely to start due to a niggling injury. Perhaps Australia would nick a consolation set piece late on. Previews of the game also referenced the ‘champion’s curse’: since 1998, no reigning World Cup winner has managed to get beyond the group stage. But then, we’d already had the shock of the day, I thought to myself. Surely lightning couldn’t strike twice?

I resisted the urge to place the bet, though not out of wisdom or self-control. I’d just spent an afternoon in the company of Dr. Philip Newall, a psychologist from the University of Bristol, who had forewarned me about the behavioural science of long-shot offers that are designed to be equal parts psychologically alluring and mathematically deceiving.

Had I taken the World Cup bet, Newall explained that I’d end up exactly where the industry wanted me. And he was proved correct: France ended up defeating Australia by four goals to one, and Mbappé did indeed score. Unfortunately, Australia scored the first goal of the game, so while I was painstakingly close, I failed to predict either the correct scoreline or the first goal scorer.

Most fans have fallen foul of such alluring offers at some point. Turns out we’re suckers for bets with high potential gains because we lack the skill and patience to accurately calculate the true probabilities of highly specific compound events. “People don’t properly understand the probability of compound events — that is, the probability of several events happening at the same time. They focus too much on the high odds or the amount they can win,” explains Newall.

What we should be calculating is the expected value or return of the bet, weighing up the chances of it happening against the money we stand to win if it comes off. My flawed probability forecasting instead centred on what psychologists call “representativeness,” a bias which leads us to believe that each of the events in isolation could happen, even though the probability means that they’re very unlikely to occur in combination. It’s much more likely that the highly specific event nearly happens. The result is a highly profitable long-shot market for the gambling firms, who have used cold hard statistical modelling and cutting-edge consumer psychology to exploit their advantage for more than a decade.

Newall traces the birth of this “cash cow” market all the way back to 2010, when he first noticed daily special adverts in the windows of betting shops near his home in south London. By the time the 2014 World Cup rolled around, he had gathered data revealing how the gambling firms had re-engineered the choice architecture in ways that boosted their profit margin by a factor of six — up from 5.7 per cent on a simple gamble like “France to win” to a staggering 34.6 per cent on bets requiring the exact result and first goal scorer. Predictably, this trend intensified at the 2018 World Cup such that straightforward bets on a “home win,” “away win” or “draw” had all but been retired. No prizes for guessing that high-odds bets had replaced them. Or for predicting a record-breaking World Cup betting turnover.

A logical follow-on question would be to ask why sports fans haven’t grown wise to these ploys over time. The answer, however, is that odds trickery is just one of the myriad features that gambling firms can use to their advantage. This isn’t new, of course, in gambling or in business. And if behavioural scientists like Philip Newall are to be believed, the tricks of the old-world bookmaking trade are still in play, as is a whole gamut of new industry chicanery. “There’s so many different biases or tricks that people can fall for and ways that these can be exploited,” cautions Newall, who has even coined the phrase “dark nudges” to capture the breadth of these behavioural hacks. The “nudge” aspect borrows from the best-selling 2008 book “Nudge,” co-authored by two U.S. professors, Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School. Their goal was to harness the science of behavioural psychology towards socially constructive ends — “nudging” people to take decisions that have net benefits both for them and society as a whole. Such was the popularity of nudge economics that it gained traction at the highest levels of government. David Cameron was so convinced that he set up a specialist Behavioural Insights team, or “nudge unit,” to realize positive paths to social change that go with the grain of human nature.

In sharp contrast, the “dark” side of nudge economics concerns how most corporate investment in behaviour change is ruthlessly driven by extractive business models. There are many examples, but gambling, for Newall, “is the purest industry where customer deception and exploitation must exist for economic activity to happen.” At its core, a dark nudge in the gambling world extends to any manipulative use of behavioural psychology to exploit our biases for profit. The techniques are often ingenious hacks of human nature, promoting choice and an illusion of control while feeding us inducements and freebies designed to flatten our defences. Industry, for their part, deny the use of any chicanery. They regularly point to the fact that behavioural profiling tools serve a positive function when used to identify customers at risk, or to intervene in the interests of their protection. They also point out that, having moved into the realm of mainstream leisure and entertainment, their core business model today is one that hinges on designing products their customers enjoy “responsibly.”

Excerpted from “Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sports” by Darragh McGee. Copyright © 2026 Darragh McGee. Published by Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.