One area of sports media that you perhaps haven’t considered is the industry of sports betting. Sports betting has a yearly revenue of just over 14 billion dollars and that amount is said to increase over the next years. So even if you prefer reading about sports news and athletes, you, unfortunately, can’t deny that sports betting has a big impact on the sporting world, just look at those figures alone. This in turn impacts the way fans perceive certain sports and teams, which affects the team’s bottom line.
This article aims to shed light on how sports betting has changed over the past decade and what this means for avid sports fans and the sports industry as a whole.
Technology Has Had the Biggest Impact
Sports betting has been around for a long time. You know it from the time of the Kings and Queens and their horses and Corgies in Great Britain, it then became more popular in underground scenes in boxing rings and MMA cages and now it is out in the open and includes almost every sport under the sun. Not only is it out in the open but it has become almost completely digital, meaning that more users can engage with it and it has a global nature. The main reason for all these changes and improvements has been through, you guessed it, technology.
Without technology, you would never be able to participate in online gambling, as safely and quickly as you can today. Now there are many online sites that you can make an instant bet on within seconds. In fact, you can try one of the Alberta casinos online to see just how quickly and easily making bets has become, in the wider world of gambling.
Technology also influences how you can make bets. It is not just that it is digital but the finer nuances within, such as micro-betting. This might sound like a new name for you but micro-betting is the act of making small bets on sports teams. It allows you to avoid making such hefty investments and it also gives you the chance to place a wager on a small action e.g., whether or not Ronaldo is going to make the penalty, if the referee is going to penalize Mbappe for his tackle and the list goes on. These are all ‘micro’ things that happen within a game but there are thousands of them, which means there are now thousands of ways you can engage with sports.
Beyond all this is the safety perspective. Technology has allowed sports betting sites to become as safe as they have ever been. As a betting fan, this means that you can feel a sense of calm when placing a bet, knowing that your data is safe and stored correctly.
How Fans Perceive Teams Today
The interesting thing about sports media is that it’s not just the online outlets that have an impact on how sports fans perceive their teams but also what the odds are of their team winning or losing. In a world that has as much data as possible, people are a little prone to looking at trends and predictions, much more than was the case a few years ago. Therefore, sports betting has become quite an important part of a fan’s journey, not because they’re going to place a per se but because they like to see what the figures and odds look like for their favorite team.
If a team is often bet on and has a good ranking, fans will steer more toward supporting that team. Just like if you watch a fighting match between two boxers, you kind of want to know which person is going to win before they even enter the ring and that’s where you can make use of sports betting platforms to see what the general thoughts are around the world concerning who is going to come out on top. It’s based on facts, like their past wins, age and how well they’re currently fighting but it’s not a science and there is an element of surprise that you should never ignore.
The Sports Industry’s Bottom Line
Further, touching on public opinion from above, sports betting platforms and their rankings also have an impact on the bottom line of the sports industry in general. If the NFL has a lot of teams that get a lot of support from fans through sports betting channels, you can be sure that more sponsors are going to try to offer their endorsements because they want to have access to those fans in some form or other. Therefore, sports betting is truly all-encompassing.
As you can see from the above, sports betting does form a part of sports media, especially in today’s age. If you want to partake in sports betting, please do so responsibly, create a strict financial and time budget beforehand and never invest more than what you have lying around on the side.
