The new National Football League season will see plenty of records set on the field — and it’s expected to hit new heights off the field, too: specifically, the American Gaming Association projects that legal wagers on games will reach $35 billion, a 30 percent increase over last season. Most of that betting will involve online betting apps. In part, the growth reflects the fact that three new states — Maine, North Carolina and Vermont — have legalized legal sports betting, raising the total to 38 states and the District. And partly the projected growth reflects new incentives sportsbooks are offering gamblers: in-app live-streaming of games, platform upgrades to allow faster in-play betting, digital wallets and the ability to make multiple bets simultaneously. X is awash with sites offering tips and techniques for increasing the odds.

Legal sports gambling — unleashed by a 2018 Supreme Court decision — brought a new revenue stream to state governments (albeit not as lucrative a stream as some hoped) and, no doubt, mitigated some problems associated with illegal gambling. And, in many cases, participants in legal betting have enjoyed doing so without major issues. Yet for many others, the explosion of legal betting has also brought a host of negative side effects, financial and psychological, as we’ve noted before. So far, though, concerns about those problems have been based to a large extent on anecdotal evidence, such as reports of increased calls to gambling addiction hotlines.

Now comes more systematic research to quantify these troubling impacts. Researchers from UCLA and the University of Southern California published a paper this summer in which they examined credit scores, credit card balances, loan delinquency rates and other detailed financial data for roughly 7 million Americans. Using this information, they were able to contrast the experience of individuals in various states before and after they adopted legal sports gambling.

The findings provide cause for concern: The average credit score in states that legalized sports betting decreased by 0.3 percent — and by one percent, three times the average, in states that allow online sports betting. These might seem like small shifts, but they represent averages for entire state populations. This implies that a relatively small group of intensive users — “problem gamblers” — are suffering major damage to their credit scores, dragging down the overall average. Financial institutions in those states responded to the reduced creditworthiness of their consumers by lowering available credit limits, they found. The results were larger for young men from lower-income counties in those states. Meanwhile, states that legalized sports betting saw significant increases in bankruptcy filing rates and debt collections. Debt consolidation loans went up 8 percent by dollar value, and auto loan delinquencies increased 9 percent.

“Together, these results indicate that the ease of access to sports gambling is harming consumer financial health by increasing their level of debt,” the study’s authors wrote. “While many states may have opted for legalization with the hope of increasing tax revenue, the negative effect we document can partially offset tax revenue benefits as more consumers’ financial health deteriorates.”

In short, legal sports gambling is creating a pathway to financial distress for vulnerable individuals. States that legalized sports betting were often instructed by their legislatures to set aside some funding from the tax receipts to deal with problem gambling and addiction. But reporting and research show a huge disparity between how much states tax the betting industry.

In many states, gambling treatment centers are woefully underfunded even as the betting industry brings in billions of dollars. Montana stands out as one state that provides no taxpayer money for gambling addiction. The Montana Council on Problem Gambling is funded through donations, including from the gambling industry.

The federal government imposes a separate 0.25 percent excise tax on sports wagers, the proceeds of which go to the general Treasury. There might be some benefit from proposed legislation to dedicate some of it to support state gambling treatment programs and research into problem gambling and its effects. But it’s an after-the-fact fix to gambling-related harms as opposed to what’s really needed: prevention. That, in turn, would require reforms such as mandatory checks on bettors’ financial wherewithal and (consistent with the First Amendment) regulations on near-ubiquitous advertising, like those adopted in peer nations.

Legal sports gamblers have had their fun for half a decade now — and some have paid a high price. Congress should draw on that experience, and the new data, to design guardrails.

— The Washington Post