Gamblification, Fintech, and Fan Financial Wellbeing: A Scoping Review Through a Social-Sustainability Lens

Abstract

The gamblification of sport has entered a fintech-enabled phase in which betting is no longer merely advertised around sport but designed into the act of watching it—continuous, mobile, frictionless, and seamlessly financed. Because this transformation shortens the pathway between impulse and expenditure, its consequences are increasingly financial; yet the evidence on how it affects the financial wellbeing of fans has not been synthesised. This scoping review, conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, mapped research linking the gamblification of sport—in both its marketing and its fintech dimensions—to fan financial wellbeing. Three databases (Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed), supplemented by hand-searching and a Google Scholar sweep, yielded 69 included studies. The evidence is young, expanding, and still largely exploratory in character. It is weighted heavily toward the marketing channel (advertising, sponsorship, inducements, normalisation), which is mature and well-theorised, whereas the fintech affordances of the betting product form a distinct but smaller literature, and financial wellbeing is most often reached only indirectly through marketing-driven overspend. Only five of the 69 studies directly measured a financial outcome, and all five lay within the fintech channel; the intersection at the centre—where the redesigned product meets the financial lives of vulnerable fans—remains largely unoccupied. We reframe this gap as a question of the social sustainability of sport, bearing on equity, wellbeing, and responsible consumption (SDGs 10, 3, and 12), and set out a research and governance agenda to address it.

1. Introduction

Watching sport and wagering on it have become almost inseparable experiences. Across stadiums, broadcasts, and the small luminous screens we carry everywhere, betting has been woven so intimately into the texture of contemporary sport that the two now share a single architecture of attention. Shirt fronts, pitch-side hoardings, half-time odds, and the gentle, constant invitation to “bet now, in-play” have made gambling not an adjacent industry but a defining feature of how sport is produced, broadcast, and consumed [1,2]. Sports betting has, in barely two decades, grown into a vast, data-intensive, and globally expanding market, its revenues rising steeply in many jurisdictions, which has liberalised it [3,4].

Scholars have named this gradual, thorough absorption the gamblification of sport—the deep embedding of gambling within the cultural and commercial life of sporting competition [1,2]. For most of its history, this embedding has been, above all, a story of marketing: the omnipresence of betting sponsorship on jerseys and around grounds [5,6], the persuasive design of wagering advertisements and their symbolic alignment with fan rituals, mateship, and masculinity [7,8], the seductive architecture of inducements and “bonus” offers [9,10], and the steady normalisation of betting as an ordinary companion to being a fan—a normalisation that reaches even children [11,12]. That story is important, and it has been carefully told, including in several recent syntheses [13,14,15,16].

Yet something more consequential has happened alongside it: the product itself has been redesigned. The migration of betting onto mobile applications has dissolved the old frictions of time, place, and pace. A wager that once required a visit to a betting shop is now a single, frictionless touch, available continuously and tailored to the unfolding rhythm of a live match. The rise of live in-play and micro-betting—the capacity to stake, moment by moment, on the next corner, the next point, the next serve—together with cash-out features, embedded payment rails, and gamified interfaces, has transformed sports betting from a discrete, event-bound act into a rapid and continuous financial activity [17,18,19,20]. This is the fintech era of sports betting: a convergence of wagering with data markets, platform design, and digital finance [2,21]. It is no longer merely the advertising of gambling around sport; it is the fintech-enabled design of gambling into the very act of watching.

This transformation carries implications that reach well beyond individual leisure, for it changes the pathway between a moment of excitement and a financial commitment. When betting is continuous, immediate, and seamlessly financed, that pathway becomes remarkably short, and its consequences settle not only in behaviour but in household finances. Emerging evidence, much of it drawn from large-scale banking and transaction data, links intensive gambling—and, for sports betting specifically, its app-based forms—to reduced savings, crowded-out investment, rising consumer debt, and financial distress, with harms concentrated among frequent bettors and already vulnerable households [4,22,23,24]. Much of this financial evidence derives from general-gambling populations; the sports-betting-specific findings come chiefly from transaction-data studies of online sports betting [4]. These consequences are, in turn, part of a broader financialization of everyday life, in which the affordances of digital technologies fold betting into the mundane textures of social and economic experience and into everyday forms of indebtedness [25,26,27]. Financial harm, moreover, falls unevenly: it is most pronounced among younger men, those on lower incomes, and those already at risk [28,29]. It is precisely because these harms are financial that governments have begun to experiment with affordability checks and financial-risk assessments—themselves reliant on the open-banking infrastructure of digital finance—as instruments of harm prevention [29].

Read through the lens of sustainability, these are not private misfortunes but questions of the social sustainability of sport. Gambling is, as recent scholarship insists, an atypical consumer product—one inherently risky even when experienced as beneficial [30]—and its embedding in sport bears directly on responsible consumption (SDG 12), on health and wellbeing (SDG 3), and on the inequalities that harm concentrates and deepens (SDG 10) [31]. The financial wellbeing of sport’s audiences is, in this sense, part of the sustainability of sport itself.

The existing evidence base, however substantial, has not yet been assembled around this precise concern. Recent syntheses illuminate the marketing dimension with real rigour, but their gaze rests on advertising as the exposure and on gambling behaviour or attitudes as the outcome [13,14]. Broader harm frameworks, for their part, treat gambling generically, without attending to the particular technology of the betting product [32]. Two things therefore remain unmapped. First, the fintech affordances that distinguish contemporary sports betting from its earlier forms—the apps, the live and micro-betting formats, the embedded payments—have not been synthesised as a mechanism in their own right. Second, the financial wellbeing of sport audiences, as distinct from their gambling behaviour, has not been drawn together as an outcome. It is at this intersection—where the redesigned architecture of the betting product meets the financial lives of those who follow sport—that the literature is most fragmented and a synthesis most needed.

This scoping review is designed to map that intersection. Rather than test a single hypothesis, it seeks to chart the extent, range, and nature of research linking the gamblification of sport, in both its marketing and fintech dimensions, to the financial wellbeing of fans, and to locate the responses—of governance, regulation, and responsible consumption—that this literature proposes. Deliberately broad in scope, spanning all sports, all regions, and multiple disciplines, the review is intended to reveal not only what is known but where the silences lie, including the geographies and sporting contexts that remain largely unstudied.

Specifically, the review asks the following:

• RQ1: What is the extent, range, and nature of research linking the gamblification of sport to fan financial wellbeing?
• RQ2: Through which mechanisms—marketing (sponsorship, advertising) and fintech affordances (apps, in-play and micro-betting, embedded payments)—is gambling embedded in the sport experience?
• RQ3: Which financial-wellbeing outcomes have been studied and for which populations, including vulnerable subgroups?
• RQ4: What theories, disciplines, designs, and data sources have been used, and where do the gaps lie?
• RQ5: What governance, regulatory, and responsible-consumption responses are proposed, and how do they connect to the social sustainability of sport?

The conceptual framework that guides the review is summarised in Figure 1.

Figure 1. A conceptual model of fintech-era gamblification as a commercial determinant of the social sustainability of sport. Two channels of gamblification—the marketing embedding of betting and the fintech redesign of the betting product—converge to intensify and normalise betting, shortening the pathway to fan financial (well) being outcomes. This pathway is moderated by vulnerability and acted upon by governance and responsible-consumption levers, and its harms radiate to affected others, households, and communities, bearing on the social sustainability of sport across the Sustainable Development Goals for health and wellbeing (SDG 3), reduced inequalities (SDG 10), and responsible consumption (SDG 12). The whole is read through the complementary lenses of the commercial determinants of health and the financialization of everyday life.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Study Design

Given the breadth and interdisciplinarity of the question, a scoping review was chosen as the design best tailored to the task. Scoping reviews are designed to map a broad and heterogeneous field, to clarify key concepts, and to identify gaps, rather than to estimate a pooled effect as a systematic review with meta-analysis would [33]. The review followed the methodological framework established by Arksey and O’Malley [34], as refined by Levac et al. [35] and formalised in the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) guidance [36], and is reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) [37].

2.2. Protocol and Registration

The review was guided by a written protocol prepared a priori, which specified the research questions, eligibility criteria, search strategy, and charting approach set out below and which was followed throughout the review. The protocol was registered with INPLASY (International Platform of Registered Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocols), which accepts scoping-review protocols; registration was completed at the analysis stage and is therefore retrospective rather than prospective (registration number INPLASY202690072; https://doi.org/10.37766/inplasy2026.9.0072).

In moving from an a priori plan to the completed review, several scope decisions were refined, which we record here for transparency. First, the backward and forward citation chasing anticipated in the protocol was not performed; supplementary searching was confined to hand-searching of leading journals and a Google Scholar sweep. Second, the planned bibliometric co-word and co-authorship layer was replaced by a focused analysis of review-dimension co-occurrence and temporal change, proportionate to the size of the corpus (Section 3.7). Third, grey literature and regulatory reports were not formally charted but were consulted only to contextualise the findings (Section 2.4). Fourth, inclusion was restricted to peer-reviewed journal articles and reviews, so the conference papers and other non-journal formats anticipated in the protocol were not charted. Fifth, the planned extension of the date threshold to 2000 was not run; the 2007 threshold was retained throughout, with the broader term-block variant serving as the sensitivity check. None of these refinements altered the review’s questions or its core eligibility concept.

2.3. Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility was framed using the population–concept–context (PCC) mnemonic recommended for scoping reviews. The population comprised sport audiences—fans, spectators, and consumers of sport—exposed to sports betting, together with general adult populations studied within a sports-betting context; athletes considered as bettors were eligible as a labelled sub-population. The concept was the gamblification of sport, understood as the embedding of gambling in the sport experience through marketing (sponsorship, advertising) and/or fintech affordances (mobile applications, in-play and micro-betting, embedded payments, gamified design) and/or the relationship of this embedding to financial wellbeing and financial harm. The context was any country or regulatory setting in which commercial, legal, or grey-market sports betting operates, across professional and amateur sport and online and land-based environments.

Studies were included when they concerned sport-related betting (wagering on sport, including horse and greyhound racing and esports) and addressed at least one review dimension—the marketing or fintech mechanisms of its embedding in sport, financial or economic wellbeing/harm, or governance and responsible-consumption responses. Peer-reviewed journal articles and review articles published from 2007 (the threshold of the smartphone era) onward, in English, were eligible. Book chapters, conference papers, editorials, commentaries, preprints, data descriptors, government reports, and study protocols were excluded. Studies were also excluded where gambling was not sport-related; where sports betting appeared only within a pooled general-gambling analysis and was not separately examined; where the design concerned only market efficiency, odds, or outcome prediction or only behavioural, clinical, or problem-gambling constructs, without a marketing, fintech, financial-wellbeing, or governance dimension; and where the studied outcome fell outside these dimensions (for example, violence or substance use). Consistent with scoping-review methodology, studies were not excluded on the basis of their perceived quality, novelty, or magnitude of contribution; the aim was to map the field as it stands, allowing thin, incremental, or repetitive areas to register as findings in their own right rather than to be filtered out by a subjective judgement of significance. A study was treated as sport-related only where wagering on the outcome of sporting events (including horse and greyhound racing and esports) was the subject of the study or was analysed as a distinct category; studies in which sports betting appeared merely as one of several gambling forms within a pooled analysis, and was not examined in its own right, did not meet this threshold and were excluded.

Because the review’s purpose was to map the whole terrain of gamblification, a study was eligible if it addressed any one of the review’s dimensions; not every included study therefore examines fans or financial wellbeing directly. This breadth is deliberate, and its consequences are made fully transparent by the dimension tagging and by the descriptive counts, which show exactly how much of the corpus engages each dimension—and, in particular, how few studies reach financial wellbeing through direct measurement (Section 3.6).

2.4. Information Courses

Three databases were searched systematically: Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection, and PubMed/MEDLINE. These were supplemented by hand-searching the recent contents of leading sport-management and gambling-studies journals and by a Google Scholar sweep. Because some databases were not accessible to the team (SPORTDiscus, for example), these supplementary searches were conducted with particular care. The searches were conducted on 4 August 2026; the exact strings, dates and record counts for each source are provided in Supplementary Material S1. Although the formal charting was confined to peer-reviewed journal articles and reviews so as to keep the evidence map reproducible, a small number of influential non-journal sources—notably major public-health and regulatory reports—were consulted to contextualise the findings and are cited as background where relevant (Section 4.4).

2.5. Search Strategy

The search was built from four concept blocks reflecting the review’s conceptual architecture: sport, gambling, mechanism (marketing and fintech affordances), and outcome (financial wellbeing and harm). The core query combined sport AND gambling AND (mechanism OR outcome), with a broader variant omitting the third and fourth blocks run as a sensitivity check. Within each block a comprehensive set of synonyms and truncated word-stems was used to maximise sensitivity; for the gambling/betting concept, for instance, these included gambl*, betting, bettor*, wager*, bookmaker*, and sportsbook*, while the sport, mechanism, and outcome blocks were expanded in the same way. The complete list of search terms for every concept block, together with the full, reproducible strings for Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed, is provided in Supplementary Material S1. After searching, results were limited to the period from 2007, to English-language records, and to journal articles and review articles.

2.6. Selection of Sources of Evidence

All records were exported to a reference manager and de-duplicated, and the de-duplicated set was uploaded to Rayyan [38] for screening. The review team comprised eight members working in three groups (of three, three, and two reviewers); the corpus was divided among the groups, and within each group every title and abstract, every full-text eligibility decision, and every charted data item was assessed independently by all members of the group—that is, by two reviewers in one group and by three in each of the other two, so that every record underwent independent duplicate (and, in most cases, triplicate) assessment. Disagreements were identified at the point of comparison and resolved by the two most experienced reviewers, the resulting decision being adopted only once endorsed by the team; formal inter-rater agreement statistics (such as Cohen’s kappa) were not calculated, with agreement being reached through structured discussion and consensus. A pilot calibration on an initial sample preceded the full screen, aligning the reviewers’ application of the criteria and resolving three recurring scope questions: whether commentaries and other non-article publication types should be admitted (they were not; the review was confined to peer-reviewed articles and reviews); whether studies whose only reported outcome lay outside the review’s three dimensions—for example intimate-partner violence or substance use—should be included (they were not); and whether non-wagering monetisation, such as fantasy-sports microtransactions, fell within scope (it did not, the review being confined to wagering on sport). Titles and abstracts were screened first, and reports judged potentially eligible were assessed at full text against the criteria in Section 2.3, with a reason recorded for every full-text exclusion.

The database searches identified 2592 records (Scopus 897, Web of Science 1314, PubMed 381). After 1124 duplicates were removed, 1468 records were screened on title and abstract, of which 916 were excluded. Of the 552 reports sought for retrieval, 55 could not be accessed and 8 were further duplicates, leaving 489 assessed for eligibility, of which 421 were excluded with reasons. One further study was identified through the supplementary Google Scholar search (Section 2.4; Supplementary Material S1). In total, 69 studies were included. The selection process is summarised in the PRISMA-ScR flow diagram (Figure 2). The 55 reports that could not be retrieved represent approximately 10% of those sought for retrieval. Their full texts were not available through the library consortium to which the review team has access, being published in subscription or access-restricted journals; a breakdown by source journal is provided in Supplementary Material S1. Because these full texts could not be obtained, the eligibility of these reports—and the review dimension(s) they might have addressed—could not be determined; they are therefore characterised only by the source journal recorded in the search results.

Figure 2. PRISMA-ScR flow diagram of study identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion (final included n = 69).

2.7. Data Charting

Each study was tagged with every review dimension it addressed—marketing, fintech affordances, financial wellbeing, and/or governance—so a study could carry more than one dimension, and the dimension counts therefore sum to more than 69 and are not mutually exclusive. A study was coded to the marketing dimension if it examined the advertising, sponsorship, inducement, or normalisation of betting in sport; to the fintech dimension if it examined an affordance of the betting product (app-based access, live in-play or micro-betting, cash-out, embedded payments, or platformisation); to the financial-wellbeing dimension if it examined a financial exposure or outcome (expenditure, debt, savings, household finances, or financial harm); and to the governance dimension if it examined regulation, responsible-gambling tools, or policy responses (Section 3.1). The corpus comprises both primary studies and secondary syntheses (11 review articles). Reviews were charted and reported as syntheses of existing work, not as independent primary evidence; where a review and one or more of the primary studies it summarises both met eligibility, this overlap is noted in the narrative so that the same underlying findings are not treated as independent support.

2.8. Synthesis of Results

The synthesis proceeded in two complementary layers. A descriptive numerical analysis characterised the distribution of the evidence by year, geography, sport, study design, and review dimension (Section 3.1). A qualitative thematic synthesis then organised the findings along the conceptual framework (Figure 1), the marketing and fintech channels of gamblification, the intensification and normalisation of betting, the financial-wellbeing outcomes and the vulnerabilities that moderate them, and the governance and responsible-consumption responses. The review dimensions charted for each study were confined to the marketing and fintech mechanisms, financial wellbeing, and governance (Section 2.7); the alignment of the findings with the dimensions of social sustainability and with specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 3, 10, and 12) was not part of the charting framework. It was applied interpretively at the synthesis stage, as an organising lens through which to read the mapped evidence, and is presented throughout as the authors’ framework rather than as a category coded from the studies themselves. In keeping with scoping-review methodology, a formal critical appraisal or risk-of-bias assessment of the individual sources was not undertaken, as the review’s purpose is to map the extent, range, and nature of the evidence rather than to synthesise effect estimates or grade the certainty of findings [33,36,37]. Accordingly, the review characterises what the literature examines and where it is silent and does not make claims about the methodological strength of individual studies.

3. Results

3.1. Characteristics of the Included Studies

The review included 69 studies, published between 2008 and 2026 (Table 1). Their most immediate feature is their recency: the field is a young and rapidly expanding one. Only two studies predate 2015, whereas 48 of the 69 (70%) appeared from 2021 onward, with the annual output rising steeply to peaks of ten studies in 2024 and thirteen in 2025 (2026 is represented by four studies at the time of searching). This temporal concentration mirrors the emergence of the very phenomenon the review examines—the migration of sports betting into a continuous, app-based, “fintech-era” activity—and signals a literature still very much in formation.

Table 1. Characteristics of the 69 included studies, grouped by primary review dimension. Within each group, studies are ordered chronologically to convey the development of the field; the full set of dimensions each study addresses is shown in the Dimension(s) column.

Study	Country	Design & Sample	Sport	Dimension(s)	Mechanism/Exposure	Financial-Wellbeing Outcome	Key Findings
Category A—Marketing embedding of gambling in sport (sponsorship, advertising, inducements, normalisation) (n = 44)
Lamont 2011 [39]	Australia	Conceptual/literature-review paper proposing a research and regulatory framework	Sport sponsorship (sporting codes, teams, events) by commercial gambling providers	Mechanism (marketing) Governance	Sport sponsorship by commercial gambling providers exposing large media/fan audiences to gambling promotion and normalisation	—	Gambling sport sponsorship gives products substantial exposure to audiences including youth, at-risk and problem gamblers, potentially prompting or increasing gambling. It is framed as promoting a risky behaviour that may exacerbate the public-health issue of problem gambling, paralleling earlier tobacco and alcohol sponsorship. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for an interdisciplinary research agenda on corporate social responsibility and regulation of gambling sponsorship.
Bestman 2015 [11]	Australia	Experimental study using projective techniques, 85 children aged 5–12	Multiple sports (rugby league, AFL, soccer, cricket, basketball); gambling/alcohol/junk-food sponsorship	Mechanism (marketing)	Shirt/jersey sponsorship by gambling, alcohol and junk-food brands	—	Three quarters (77%) of children correctly identified at least one shirt sponsor, and children associated alcohol and gambling brands more strongly with the more popular rugby league code. Recall was higher among 9–12 year olds than 5–8 year olds. Findings suggest sport sponsorship contributes to children’s awareness of unhealthy commodity brands.
Gordon 2015 [40]	Australia	Qualitative interpretivist study; friendship group interviews with young adult (18–30) non-pathological sports bettors	Sports betting	Mechanism (marketing)	Lifestyle consumption community dynamics and marketing potential of sports betting as a social consumption practice	At-risk consumers/problem-gambling consumption (broadened framing)	The study applies consumer culture theory and the concept of lifestyle consumption communities to understand sports betting in Australia. Findings offer insight into the locus, power structure, purpose, marketing potential, time span, structure, and social position of these communities. The authors argue a more expansive framing of problem-gambling consumption beyond individual pathology may be required.
Hing 2015 [41]	Australia	Cross-sectional online survey; 544 Australian sports bettors with varying problem gambling severity	Sports betting (embedded promotions during televised sport)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Sports-embedded gambling promotions during televised sport (product/brand placement, sponsorship, celebrity endorsement, live odds, bonus offers, promotional appeals)	Compulsive consumption linked to problem gambling; problem gamblers influenced by bonus/sign-up offers requiring deposits	Problem gamblers had the highest approval of sports-embedded promotions and reported more encouragement and influence to gamble from them compared to non-problem and at-risk gamblers. Problem gamblers were also more influenced by contextual factors, certain bet types, and promotional appeals. Three theories (product involvement, cue-induced craving, classical conditioning) are discussed to explain how these promotions may contribute to compulsive consumption.
Deans 2016 [7]	Australia	Mixed-method interpretive content analysis of 85 sports-wagering advertisements (11 companies)	Sports wagering (multiple)	Mechanism (marketing)	Sports-wagering advertising content; symbolic appeal strategies	—	Ten symbolic appeals identified (fan rituals, mateship, gender stereotypes, winning, status, thrill/risk, etc.); fan rituals and mateship most common; targeted at young male sports fans; mirrors tobacco/alcohol tactics; normalises sports wagering.
Deans 2017 [42]	Australia	Qualitative semi-structured interviews; 50 Australian men aged 20–37 who gambled on sports	Sports betting (NRL, AFL)	Mechanism (marketing)	Saturation marketing, sponsorship, sports-based commentary, and inducements	—	Most environments where participants saw or heard betting ads were not settings specifically designed for betting, and marketing saturation (including through sports commentary and programming) normalised betting. Inducements were described as effective in getting men to bet and were linked to feelings of greater control over betting outcomes. Marketing was seen to stimulate signing up with more than one provider.
Hing 2017 [9]	Australia	Content analysis/scan of inducements offered on the websites of 30 major race and sports betting brands (223 separate inducements identified)	Sports betting and race betting (wagering)	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Wagering inducements/sales promotions: 15 generic types including sign-up offers, refer-a-friend, happy hours, mobile betting bonuses, multi-bet offers, refund/stake-back, matching deposits, bonus/better odds, cash rebates, free bets, play-through conditions on bonus bets	Inducements offer financial incentives to purchase but carry complex terms and conditions (esp. play-through conditions) that are difficult to interpret and can undermine informed choice and increase spending	A scan of 30 major brands located 223 inducements categorised into 15 generic types, all offering financial incentives to purchase. All inducements were subject to numerous complex terms and conditions obscured by legalistic language, with play-through conditions on bonus bets particularly difficult to interpret. Website advertisements prominently promoted inducements, but few contained a responsible gambling message, and their alignment with harm minimisation and consumer protection goals was poor.
Pitt 2017 [12]	Australia	Qualitative study; semi-structured interviews with n = 48 children aged 8–16, Melbourne; thematic analysis	Sports betting (and other gambling products); alignment of gambling with sport	Mechanism (marketing)	Marketing and advertising of gambling products; media (particularly marketing); alignment of gambling with sport; influence of family and friends	—	Children’s perceptions of gambling products were shaped by what they saw or heard through family activities, media/marketing, and the alignment of gambling with sport. Many children indicated consumption intentions towards sports betting, driven by its alignment with culturally valued activities, perceived knowledge of sport, marketing, and family/peer influence. The authors call for policies and regulations to reduce children’s exposure to gambling products and protect them from harm.
Hing 2018 [43]	Australia	Online survey; 1813 Australian sports bettors; regression analysis of inducement uptake predicting impulse betting	Sports betting (wagering), including in-play/live-action betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Uptake of wagering inducements (bonus bets, money-back guarantees, deposits, discounts) delivered at point-of-sale and via push marketing (direct emails, texts, phone calls, social media feeds)	Impulse (unplanned) in-play betting linked to inducement uptake; associated with problem gambling and financial harm as impulse betting undermines responsible consumption	More frequent users of wagering inducements had a greater tendency to place impulse in-play bets, which were also predicted by problem gambling, impulsiveness, frequent sports viewing, younger age and higher educational status. Uptake of inducements appeared particularly effective in stimulating impulse in-play betting among problem gamblers and frequent sports viewers. The authors recommend more cautious regulation of both in-play bets and wagering inducements to protect young adults from harm.
Lopez-Gonzalez 2018 [8]	Multiple (Spain and United Kingdom)	Content analysis of 133 Spanish and British television online sports betting advertisements (2014–2016) across 29 brands, using conceptual metaphor theory	Online sports betting (soccer)	Mechanism (marketing)	Latent metaphorical structure of televised online sports betting advertising	—	Four structural metaphors were identified: betting as an act of love, a market, a sport, and a natural environment. These metaphors, found widely across 29 brands, facilitated a perception of bettors as active players with an executive role over the events bet upon and greater control over bet outcomes. Such framing may distort perceived control in betting.
Lopez-Gonzalez 2018 [44]	United Kingdom	Conceptual paper using sponsorship/partnership deal data from the English Football Premier League with descriptive evidence	Football (English Premier League)	Mechanism (marketing) · Mechanism (fintech) · Financial · Governance	Sponsorship and partnership deals involving gambling, forex (foreign exchange) trading, and fantasy gaming as a proxy for the gamblification of football	Gambling firmly embedded in the financial practices of Premiership clubs; concerns for public health and wellbeing of vulnerable groups (minors, problem gamblers)	Gambling marketing is shown to be firmly embedded in the financial practices of many Premiership football clubs through sponsorship and partnership deals extending to forex trading and fantasy gaming. The symbolic linkage of sport with newer gambling-like forms is argued to be a public-health issue, especially for minors and problem gamblers. The paper explores the legal framework and marketing evolution and speculates on detrimental consequences of such marketing.
Browne 2019 [45]	Australia	Ecological momentary assessment study, 597 bettors (318 race, 279 sports), 6843 observations	Sports and race betting (incl. in-play)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Wagering advertisements and inducements (e.g., stake-back, multi-bet, cash-out, sign-up offers)	Intended and actual betting expenditure; spending more than intended	Exposure to advertising and inducements was reliably linked to higher likelihood of betting, greater intended and actual expenditure, and spending more than intended. “Push” messaging and inducements conveying reduced risk (stake-back, multi-bet) were particularly influential. Authors recommend restrictions on pushed marketing and marketing suggesting reduced risk.
Bunn 2019 [5]	United Kingdom (England and Scotland)	Documentary/descriptive analysis of shirt sponsors since 1992	Football/soccer (English and Scottish Premier Leagues)	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Shirt sponsorship by gambling companies; the 2005 Gambling Act liberalisation	—	The study tracked a pronounced increase in gambling-company shirt sponsorship in the EPL and SPL coinciding with the liberalising 2005 Gambling Act. Football’s global broadcast reach provides gambling brands substantial worldwide visibility. Authors argue current sponsorship levels are a public-health concern warranting legislative review.
Djohari 2019 [46]	United Kingdom	Mixed-methods study; 99 young people (aged 8–16) in 71 family groups plus 71 adults, South London	Sports betting/gambling in football (English Premier League)	Mechanism (marketing)	Recall and awareness of gambling advertising and shirt/team sponsorship in sport	—	Just under half of young people (46%) and 71% of adults could name at least one gambling brand unprompted, with boys and those who watched much football recalling more. Around two-thirds correctly placed shirt sponsor magnets next to the corresponding football team, and most (78% of young people, 86% of adults) thought betting had become a normal part of sport. The authors call for comprehensive advertising restrictions similar to tobacco control.
Hing 2019 [47]	Australia	Online survey experiment; 299 Australian sports bettors rated attractiveness of three variations of a bonus-bet inducement and calculated its true cost	Sports betting (wagering)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial · Governance	Bonus-bet inducements with play-through conditions; varying presentation of terms and conditions (promo1 T&Cs apply, promo2 T&Cs below offer, promo3 true cost revealed)	Nearly three in five bettors underestimated the additional amount they would need to bet to access winnings from a bonus bet, leading to overestimated attractiveness and underestimated true cost	Detailing key terms and conditions directly below an offer reduced its perceived attractiveness. Nearly 60% of bettors underestimated the additional betting required to access winnings from the bonus bet, with no significant differences across problem-gambling risk groups. Current marketing approaches likely lead consumers to overestimate attractiveness and underestimate cost, undermining informed decision-making.
Torrance 2021 [48]	Multiple	Rapid review of empirical research (2015–2020); 25 studies included, mostly from UK or Australia	Gambling advertising broadly (including sports betting and social media marketing)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Emergent gambling advertising content, targeting, embedded/interactive marketing, and financial incentivisation (inducements)	—	Emergent gambling advertising is targeted, positively framed, and in some cases overrepresents riskier bets. The sporting and social media spheres are densely populated with direct and indirect marketing, and financial incentivisation has diversified under strict, esoteric conditions. Little advertising contained harm-reductive or responsible gambling content.
Boelsen-Robinson 2022 [49]	Australia	Qualitative study, four focus groups (29 frequent sport spectators)	Multiple elite sports (cricket, tennis, AFL, rugby, soccer); gambling/alcohol/fast-food sponsorship	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Sponsorship of elite sport by unhealthy commodities; policies to restrict sponsorship	—	Participants identified contradictions between healthy sport and unhealthy commodity sponsorship and viewed gambling as posing the greatest health risk. They supported policies reducing children’s exposure but were concerned about financial risk to sporting clubs. Governments and sports associations were seen as responsible for enacting change.
Etuk 2022 [16]	Multiple	Systematic review (PRISMA); 65 peer-reviewed articles on sports betting (2010–2022) from PubMed, Web of Science, PsycINFO	Sports betting (land-based and online, general)	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Marketing and promotion of sports betting; normalisation and persuasiveness of advertising across jurisdictions	Financial problems associated with problem gambling/gambling disorder	Marketing and promotion of sports betting were more prominent in Australia and the United Kingdom, and interviews with bettors showed sports betting is perceived as persuasive and normalised. Psychosocial problems did not differ greatly by country, and sports betting was associated with elevated problem gambling. China and South Korea imposed stricter regulations restricting access compared to Australia and the United States.
Hing 2022 [50]	Australia	Qualitative telephone interview study; 19 long-term online gamblers with no treatment-seeking history and 10 recent treatment seekers (thematic analysis)	Online gambling including sports and racing (and multi-bets, novel bet types)	Mechanism (marketing) · Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	Increased speed/ease of access, streamlined financial transactions, digital money, complex/innovated bet types (multi-bets, cash-out), advertising and inducements (matching deposits, bonus bets, refunds), targeted push marketing	Treatment seekers reported inducements and complex bets fostered increased gambling, impulsive gambling, persistence, loss-chasing and debts	Both treatment and non-treatment seekers observed increased speed and ease of online gambling, continued proliferation of advertising and inducements, and a vast range of new bet types (particularly multi-bets). Treatment seekers disproportionately reported negative effects, describing how these changes fostered increased, impulsive gambling and loss-chasing, with limited uptake and effectiveness of harm minimisation tools. Faster internet speeds and streamlined financial transactions on apps had accelerated the betting process.
Killick 2022 [51]	Multiple (mostly Australia)	Systematic review of 22 empirical studies (qualitative, cross-sectional, experimental, longitudinal); adult samples	Sports betting advertising	Mechanism (marketing)	Sports betting advertising and wagering inducements (cash-back offers, bonuses, enhanced odds, customised bets, direct messages)	—	Sports betting marketing showed a positive relationship with sports betting attitudes, intentions, and behaviours. The influence appeared strongest among those scoring higher on problem gambling severity, and inducements lowered perceptions of risk. Much of the evidence came from Australian, self-reported cross-sectional samples, so findings should be interpreted with caution.
Nyemcsok 2022 [52]	Australia	Qualitative study; in-depth interviews with n = 16 young men aged 18–24 who bet on sport at least monthly, Victoria; reflexive thematic analysis (sociology of risk)	Sports betting (online)	Mechanism (marketing)	Exposure to gambling advertising; embedded/normalised nature of sports betting in social and peer environments; peer rivalry and competition	—	Four themes shaped young men’s risk perceptions: the role of early experiences (including exposure to gambling advertising and social networks’ behaviours), peer rivalry and competition, the normalisation of gambling in everyday activities, and perceptions of knowledge, skill and control. Participants believed they could engage in responsible behaviours and stop if needed. The authors argue public-health strategies must broaden beyond individual responsibility to target social and commercial factors.
Wardle 2022 [53]	UK	Two online cross-sectional surveys: regular sports bettors (n ≈ 3000) and emerging adults 16–24 (n ≈ 3500); logistic regression	Sports betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial · Governance	Marketing awareness; direct marketing receipt; following gambling brands on social media	Unplanned gambling spending (marketing-prompted overspend)	~31% of sports bettors said marketing prompted unplanned spending; strongly associated with problem-gambling severity (adj OR ≈ 17), direct marketing and following brands on social media; supports stricter marketing controls.
Alonso-Dos-Santos 2023 [54]	United Kingdom	Experimental study (SEM/multi-group analysis), 518 subjects	Sports betting (general sport sponsorship)	Mechanism (marketing)	Sponsorship by commercial gambling providers; articulation, perceived congruence and sincerity of sponsor	—	Subjects showed greater willingness to bet when the gambling-provider sponsor was perceived as congruent and sincere, suggesting such sponsorship can encourage sports betting. Perceived congruence and sincerity positively influenced attitudes toward the sponsor and gambling. Authors note eliminating gambling-provider sponsorship is complex given the substantial funding it provides sport.
Hing 2023 [1]	Australia	Narrative literature review identifying seven key issues on the gamblification of sport	Sports betting (football codes and other sports; wagering)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial · Governance	Sports betting sponsorship and advertising; innovated betting options appealing to harmed bettors; normalisation of sports betting through marketing imagery/language embedding gambling into sport	Sports betting losses cause significant financial loss, harmful gambling patterns and addiction; sports organisations derive revenues in large part from harmful gambling by fans	A narrative review identified seven key issues arising from the gamblification of sport, including harmful sports betting, increased smartphone access, innovated betting options appealing to harmed bettors, advertising exacerbating harm, normalisation among fans, impacts on children/adolescents, and heightened risk among sports participants. Sports organisations play an instrumental role in gamblification and derive revenues largely from harmful gambling by fans through sponsorship, profit-sharing, data rights and licensing. Rising community backlash and increasing regulatory restrictions suggest gambling sponsorship of sport will become untenable.
Killick 2023 [13]	Multiple	Systematic review of 15 empirical content-analysis studies of sports betting advertising	Sports betting advertising (predominantly television)	Mechanism (marketing)	Content of sports betting advertisements (narratives, media type, target audience); friendship and humour themes embedded in televised sport	—	Included studies were recent (since 2012) and predominantly analysed the content of television advertisements. Friendship and humour were the most commonly identified narratives, and advertising was frequently embedded into professional sports games, occurring more often than commercial advertising during televised matches. The review noted a general lack of reporting on inter-coder reliability and called for improved methodological standards.
Nyemcsok 2023 [55]	Australia	Qualitative study; in-depth interviews with n = 16 young men aged 18–24 who regularly bet on sport, Melbourne; reflexive thematic analysis	Sports betting (online)	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Online sports betting advertising and inducements; discussion of regulatory/consumer protection strategies (deposit limits, sign-up inducement bans)	—	Young male gamblers proposed three main harm prevention strategies: online consumer protection and regulatory measures, public education campaigns highlighting sports betting risks, and support networks to reduce stigma and encourage help-seeking. They supported stronger financial/affordability measures and compulsory deposit limits, plus increased restrictions on advertising. Young men may be difficult to engage in formal prevention, but youth-led interactive mechanisms could help.
Torrance 2023 [56]	United Kingdom	Frequency analysis of in-game logos across 10 English Premier League football broadcasts from 2022/23 season; 20,941 relevant logos coded	Football (soccer)—gambling, cryptocurrency, and financial trading marketing	Mechanism (marketing) · Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	In-game/pitch-side and shirt-front logos for gambling, cryptocurrency (cryptocasinos), and financial trading apps as gambling-like products	—	Of 20,941 logos, 64.1% were gambling only, with substantial cryptocurrency and financial trading marketing also present; pitch-side hoardings were the most frequent location (52.3%). Only 5.1% of logos were shirt-front gambling logos subject to the EPL’s voluntary 2026 ban, meaning roughly 1 in 20 gambling/gambling-like logos would be affected. Only 3.4% of logos contained harm-reduction content.
De Jans 2024 [15]	Belgium	Systematic literature review (Scopus, Web of Science); 46 publications on gambling sponsorship	Sports sponsorship by gambling companies (e.g., football/soccer shirt sponsors)	Mechanism (marketing)	Gambling sponsorship of sports, events, venues, media, and influencers/tipsters	—	Research on gambling sponsorship is concentrated on sports sponsorships, which are omnipresent in the lives of both adults and minors. A positive association between sponsorship exposure and gambling attitudes/intentions may be assumed, but causal and longitudinal evidence is limited. The authors propose an industry-specific theoretical framework to explain consumers’ responses to gambling sponsorship.
Di Censo 2024 [57]	Australia	Cross-sectional survey with hierarchical regression; 567 participants aged 18–24 with active betting accounts	Sports betting (including in-play betting)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Exposure to advertising, ad-driven betting decisions, use of betting inducements, susceptibility to inducements	Spend per session (betting expenditure) a significant predictor of PGSI	Sports betting marketing was positively associated with PGSI scores after controlling for non-marketing variables. Significant marketing predictors included ad-driven betting decisions and perceived influence from betting inducements. The study supports regulations and restrictions on advertising to protect problem gamblers.
Garzola 2024 [58]	Multiple	Narrative/systematic literature review (PRISMA-informed); 25 references on sports betting marketing across age groups (2014–2019, PubMed)	Sports betting (online betting, general)	Mechanism (marketing)	Sports betting advertising and marketing, including promotions during sport, VIP/sportsperson endorsement targeting youth	—	Marketing plays a significant role in normalising gambling in sports and has effectively reached young adult males. The review concludes policymakers should consider comprehensive approaches to reduce exposure of sports betting advertising to young individuals. Sports betting is more prevalent among males than females, and younger children tend to be more impulsive than older children.
Gordon 2024 [59]	Australia	Qualitative rhizomatic study of Australian consumers’ sports betting practices (Deleuze and Guattari framework)	Mobile smartphone sports betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Mechanism (fintech)	Mobile smartphone betting apps enabling gambling anytime/anywhere; skilfully targeted gambling marketing and financial incentives concerning sport	Financial hardship among gambling-related harms noted	The paper extends conceptualisations of risky and harmful consumption using molar and molecular lines and lines of flight. It examines tensions between how people understand themselves as gamblers, the social normalisation of gambling, and parameters of risky betting behaviour. New technologies like mobile smartphone betting apps have made it easier to gamble anywhere, anytime, and gambling marketing has been skilfully targeted toward sport.
Ireland 2024 [6]	United Kingdom	Qualitative interview study; 18 informants (football club/foundation employees, commercial football-industry actors, fan organisation members), thematic analysis using Bourdieu	Football (English Premier League); gambling, HFSS food/drink, and alcohol sponsorship	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	“Unhealthy” shirt/stadium sponsorship by unhealthy commodity industries (gambling, HFSS food and drink, alcohol) in the EPL	—	Bourdieu’s sociology of practice is used to map tensions between clubs holding economic capital and fans protecting the cultural capital of their clubs. Sponsorship by gambling and other unhealthy commodity industries is framed as a commercial determinant of health and a public-health concern. Fields of power are illustrated diagrammatically between those possessing economic capital and those defending cultural capital.
McCarthy 2024 [60]	Australia	Qualitative study; in-depth interviews with n = 24 senior leaders in community sporting organisations in Victoria and NSW; reflexive thematic analysis	Community sport (non-professional sports teams/clubs); gambling sponsorship including online wagering	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Gambling sponsorship and partnerships in community sport (branding, promotions); online wagering sponsorship perceived as more harmful than gambling venues	Sporting organisations balance reputational risk against financial stability/revenue benefits from gambling sponsorship	Community sports leaders considered alignment of values between sponsor and club, viewing online wagering as more harmful than venue-based gambling sponsorship. They weighed the impact of gambling sponsorship on the organisation’s reputation against the need for financial stability. Decisions to accept or reject sponsorship were shaped by perceived risks and benefits; regulation and formal policies were suggested as interventions.
Di Censo 2024 [61]	United Kingdom	Cross-sectional survey; 190 UK residents aged 18–24 who watched at least one 2022 World Cup match	Sports betting during the 2022 FIFA World Cup (football)	Mechanism (marketing)	Recall of advertising across media (social media, internet banners, TV) for bet types, inducements, and sign-up offers	—	Young people recalled a high amount of advertising for various bets (95.6%) and betting inducements (89.5%), including 64.2% for in-play betting and 68.1% for sign-up offers. Higher-risk gamblers recalled more advertising than lower-risk gamblers, most often on social media. Fewer than half (46.3%) were aware of advertising for responsible gambling tools.
Brown 2025 [62]	United Kingdom (Britain; Scotland/England)	Longitudinal qualitative study, in-depth interviews with 16 (then 13) regular sports bettors	Sports betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Gambling industry product offerings and marketing during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions	—	Gambling patterns during the pandemic were episodic and non-linear, shaped by constellations of factors relating to the gambling/sports landscape and disruption to daily life. The gambling industry adapted to keep reaching consumers through product offerings and marketing even amid supply restrictions. Findings support calls for multifaceted, comprehensive gambling regulation to minimise harms.
Daniel 2025 [63]	Nigeria	Cross-sectional analytical survey; 406 undergraduate students at University of Calabar	Sports betting (football, basketball, tennis; online betting)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Exposure to gambling advertisements/marketing campaigns	Betting driven by monetary gain (income supplementation); associated with debt and financial instability	36.7% had engaged in sports betting, and problem-gambling prevalence was 14.3% (47.2% among past-year bettors). The primary motivation was monetary gain (87.8%). Logistic regression showed those exposed to gambling adverts were about four times more likely to have problem gambling (OR 4.36, 95% CI 1.93–9.86).
Di Censo 2025 [64]	United Kingdom	Online survey/experimental exposure; 130 participants aged 18–24	Sports betting inducements	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Four betting inducements: sign-up, bonus bets, increased odds, and stake-back offers	Perceived promotional value of inducements; incentives lowering the cost of betting/offering free bets seen as most influential	Sign-up and bonus-bet inducements were perceived to have a stronger influence on increasing betting and engaging in higher-risk gambling than stake-back and increased odds offers. Those experiencing gambling problems were more inclined to believe incentives could motivate riskier gambling. Findings suggest restricting inducements, especially those lowering the cost of betting, could mitigate harm among young people.
Han 2025 [65]	United States	Scenario-based experiment with regression analyses; 383 U.S. sports bettors	Sports betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Governance	Celebrity endorsers in sports betting advertising; image-congruent (including same-race) endorsers paired with responsible gambling messages	—	An endorser whose image aligns with the target audience increases consumer awareness of responsible gambling messages and enhances intentions to gamble responsibly. Image-congruent endorsers also boost betting intentions and word-of-mouth advocacy for the sportsbook. Same-race endorsers were effective in enhancing image congruence only when sports betting was perceived as socially acceptable.
O Ceallaigh 2025 [66]	Ireland	Randomised pre-registered online incentive-compatible experiment; N = 622 men aged under 40; betting choices on Euro 2024 matches	Sports betting on football (Euro 2024 matches)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Gambling inducements: free bets, moneyback offers, boosted/conditional free bet offers with complex terms and conditions	Inducements increased amount spent on bets by over 10% and led to decision errors (choosing “bad bets”), heightening risk of financial harm	Inducements increased the amount spent on bets by over 10% and almost halved the number of people opting not to bet. They caused decision errors, making bettors three times more likely to choose objectively bad (dominated) bets. Those with evidence of problem gambling were disproportionately affected, supporting regulation of inducements to reduce gambling harms.
Hing 2025 [67]	Australia	Ecological momentary assessment (EMA); 814 Australian frequent bettors, 7 surveys over 2 weeks; linear mixed-effects models on 4020 observations	Sports betting and race betting (wagering)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial · Governance	Direct marketing/direct messages from wagering operators, free betting information services and paid tipsters via texts, emails, in-app notifications and phone calls; messages containing bonus bets and deposits	Betting expenditure and short-term betting harm increased with each additional message; messages from wagering operators particularly potent for higher-risk bettors	Participants received on average 12.7 messages from wagering operators, 11.8 from free services and 21.7 from tipsters over two weeks. Number of bets, expenditure and harm all increased with each additional message received through any digital channel, with messages from wagering operators particularly potent for higher-risk bettors. Direct messages can immediately stimulate betting, expenditure and harm, and many frequent bettors use affiliate services that currently have little regulatory oversight or consumer protection.
Di Censo 2026 [68]	Australia	Qualitative thematic analysis; 20 Australians aged 18–24 who bet on sports at least weekly	Online sports betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Advertising portraying betting as normal, content advertising, human/influencer branding, and betting promotions/inducements	Awareness of adverse financial consequences of disordered gambling	Initial interest in sports betting arose from early exposure to family/peer gambling and advertising normalising betting, while betting was sustained by fear of missing out on winnings, peer interest, and the availability of promotions. Respondents were cognisant of financial, psychological, and interpersonal consequences of disordered gambling. Restricting advertising and reducing social norms may reduce harm.
Li 2026 [69]	China	Cross-sectional questionnaire survey of 600 lottery players; SPSS 27.0 with PROCESS chain-mediation analysis	Sports lottery betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Inappropriate/improper publicity exposure of the sports lottery (false, misleading, exaggerated advertising and betting promotions)	Financial harms/economic losses from problematic lottery purchasing	Improper promotion of sports betting is directly and positively related to the harm of purchasing lottery tickets. The effect is mediated by a chain through obsessive/compulsive passion for lottery buying and problematic purchasing behaviours. Responsible betting purchase beliefs moderated and buffered the impact of improper promotion on gambling addiction and harm.
Rockloff 2026 [70]	Australia	Randomised field experiment embedded in a 14-day ecological momentary assessment; n = 227 regular sports/race bettors (opt-out n = 96, control n = 131)	Sports and race betting	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Direct marketing from wagering operators (emails, push notifications, text messages); opt-out intervention	Gambling expenditure (AUD spent) and number of bets placed; short-term gambling harms	Participants randomised to opt out of direct marketing placed 23% fewer bets and spent 39% less money than controls. They also reported 67% fewer short-term gambling harms. The study provides experimental causal evidence that direct marketing escalates betting and harm.
Torrance 2026 [71]	United Kingdom	Between-subjects mixed-methods online experiment; n = 585 UK bettors randomised to view a welcome bonus with or without a worked example	Sports betting (financial inducements)	Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Financial inducements (“free” bets, welcome bonuses) with complex wagering requirements; worked example disclosure	(Mis)comprehension of true inducement monetary cost/wagering requirements (median estimate £500 vs. correct £750)	Control participants (no worked example) significantly underestimated the inducement’s wagering requirements, misjudging how much of their own money they would need to stake. The inducement was rated significantly less attractive when a worked example was displayed, though this effect weakened as gambling severity increased. Bettors perceived inducements as manipulative, economically worthless, and requiring better regulation.
Category B—Fintech affordances of the betting product (apps, in-play & micro-betting, cash-out, platformisation) (n = 15)
Broda 2008 [72]	International (Germany-based operator, 84 countries)	Observational analysis of behavioural tracking records, 47,000 subscribers	Internet sports betting (fixed-odds and live-action bets)	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	Responsible-gambling deposit limits and notification messages on an online betting platform	Percentage of losses; bet size and betting frequency	Only 160 (0.3%) subscribers exceeded deposit limits at least once; these gamblers placed more and larger bets but had a lower percentage of losses than others. Gambling behaviour was slightly more unfavourable after exceeding limits. Authors conclude deposit limits may be a useful harm-reduction measure to prevent extremely large losses and bankruptcy.
Lopez-Gonzalez 2018 [2]	Multiple (European/soccer-dominated markets)	Conceptual/exploratory paper developing an analytical tool of market convergence	Online sports betting (soccer-dominated)	Mechanism (fintech) · Mechanism (marketing)	Convergence of online sports betting with adjacent digital, sporting and gambling products (data markets, eSports, virtual sports, social gaming, immersive/reality tools, fantasy sports, in-play and in-stadium betting, poker, trading)	—	The paper categorises online sports betting convergence into three fields: digital, sporting and gambling. It argues internet-based sports gambling is colonising other forms of entertainment and expanding marketing opportunities while raising psychosocial concerns such as problem gambling. Convergence is theorised through the parallel dynamics of the gamblification of sport and the sportification of gambling.
Killick 2019 [18]	United Kingdom (global website sample)	Scoping study; systematic literature review (16 academic papers + 2 grey-literature reports) plus examination of 338 online gambling websites offering sports betting	Sports betting, specifically in-play (live/in-running) betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Mechanism (marketing)	In-play betting affordances (continuous high-speed betting, “cash-out” feature, mobile/remote access) and structural characteristics that reinforce betting	Amount of money wagered/gambling-related financial harm	In-play betting turns previously discontinuous gambling into a continuous form with high event frequency, raising harm potential. Of 338 gambling websites visited, 26% offered at least one in-play betting feature. The structural characteristics of in-play betting suggest it may be more harmful than other forms of gambling.
Parke & Parke 2019 [17]	United Kingdom	Systematic grounded theory study; behavioural data and in-depth interviews with N = 19 online sports bettors meeting problem-gambling criteria	Online sports betting (incl. live/in-play betting)	Mechanism (fintech) · Mechanism (marketing)	Structural features of modern online sports betting: live/in-play betting, cash-out, micro-event betting, instant depositing; ubiquitous online marketing	Continuous online sports betting loop leads to harmful consequences and disordered/excessive play	An “Online Sports Betting Loop” emerged as the core category, facilitated by new structural features such as live betting, cash-out, micro-event betting and instant depositing. The immediate accessibility and ubiquity of online marketing made it challenging to control betting involvement. Interventions should create breaks in play and enable customers to restrict use of harmful features like live betting.
Heirene 2021 [73]	Australia	Pre-registered naturalistic randomised controlled trial (3 × 2 plus control); 31,989 (reduced to 26,560) online wagering customers across four sites	Online sports and racing wagering	Mechanism (fintech) · Governance · Financial	Consumer protection tools (deposit limits); messages via email or in-account notification (informative, social, personal) to encourage limit setting	Deposit-limit setting; reduced average daily wager, net loss and betting intensity among limit setters	Customers sent messages set deposit limits at a higher rate (0.71%) than controls (0.08%, aOR = 8.17), but social and personal messages were no more effective than informative ones and in-account messages no more effective than emails. Customers who set limits significantly decreased their average daily wager, net loss and betting intensity. Messages to online gambling customers are inexpensive and may lead to small but impactful increases in deposit-limit setting.
Newall 2021 [19]	Australia	Narrative review of research on structural characteristics of fixed-odds sports betting products (compared to EGMs)	Fixed-odds sports betting products (incl. soccer, in-play betting)	Mechanism (fintech) · Mechanism (marketing)	Structural product features: in-play/live betting, shorter payout intervals, accumulators/multis/complex bets, cash-out, custom bets, inducements/promotions, smartphone mobile betting	Structural characteristics may promote spending excessive time and money, contributing to gambling-related harm and losses	Modern fixed-odds sports betting products have increasingly incorporated structural characteristics previously found in EGMs, including shorter payout intervals, multiplier potential, high bettor involvement, and near-misses. Innovations such as in-play betting, cash-out, and online/smartphone betting increase potential betting frequency and accessibility. These features may contribute to bettors spending excessive amounts of time and money, informing policy and harm minimisation.
Hing 2023 [74]	Australia	Ecological momentary assessment (EMA); 267 young-adult respondents (18–29 yrs) analysing 1378 betting sessions over 10 weeks; factor analysis and regression	Sports betting, esports and daily fantasy sports (smartphone betting)	Mechanism (fintech) · Mechanism (marketing) · Financial	Situational features of smartphone betting: quick easy access from home, ability to bet anywhere anytime, privacy, greater access to promotions/betting options, ability to use electronic financial transactions	Greater short-term betting harm associated with betting anywhere anytime, privacy, and greater access to promotions/betting options; sessions prioritising these features involved impulsive betting and inducement use	Factor analysis revealed five situational features of betting sessions; greater short-term betting harm was significantly associated with the ability to bet anywhere anytime, privacy while betting, and greater access to promotions and betting options. Sessions prioritising these features were more likely to involve impulsive betting, use of inducements, and betting with more operators. Only smartphone betting combines all three features associated with betting harm, and respondents with more gambling problems prioritised privacy and betting anywhere.
Coelho 2024 [75]	Canada	Ecological momentary assessment study, 77 adults, 1220 observations	In-play (live) sports betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	Self-regulation strategies (setting monetary limits, time limits, stopping when not fun, taking breaks)	Money spent on in-play bets; financial harms	Participants who more often set monetary limits were less likely to experience financial, interpersonal and health harms, and set-limit occasions had fewer emotional/psychological harms. In contrast, those who set time limits tended to spend more and experience more harms. Findings support monetary limit setting, but not time limit setting, for reducing in-play betting harms.
Magidi 2024 [76]	Zimbabwe	Ethnographic study (participant/non-participant observation, betting experimentation, informal conversations), 2016–2019, in Norton and Harare	Soccer betting (English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga)	Mechanism (fintech)	Use of ICT/digital devices, Internet and mobile technology to research and place soccer bets	Betting used as informal income-generating survival strategy amid unemployment; earning a living through winnings	Urban male youth in Zimbabwe use soccer betting as an economy of hustle and waithood to survive amid unemployment and economic crisis. Betting drives adoption of ICT products and acquisition of digital, Internet and networking skills as youths research and place informed “winning bets”. Soccer betting is framed as an informal entrepreneurial livelihood strategy rather than mere leisure.
Sinclair 2024 [77]	Canada	Mixed-method cross-sectional online survey; n = 224 adults from Ontario who engaged in in-play sports betting in past three months	In-play (live) sports betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	Cash-out feature allowing bettors to withdraw a bet before the event’s final outcome	Financial motivations to gamble (making money, cutting losses); higher problem-gambling severity and gambling-related harms	About half (51.8%) of in-play bettors reported using the cash-out feature; users were significantly younger and reported higher problem gambling, alcohol and cannabis use, and depression, anxiety, and stress. Primary motivations for cashing out were to access money immediately, cut losses, and because it felt less risky. Cash-out users were more likely to endorse betting to make money.
Torrance 2024 [20]	Multiple	Scoping review of literature (2015–2022) plus utility patent analysis; 26 literature records and 8 utility patents included	Online sports betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	Structural characteristics of online sports betting products: instant accessibility, cash-out, ability to instantly deposit funds, in-play/micro-bets	—	Online sports betting is instantly accessible, provides rapid and continuous betting, and offers user-interactivity features such as cash-out and instant deposits. The market has expanded into adjacent industries such as esports, and utility patents suggest future evolution toward peer-to-peer elements, augmented reality, and highly specific statistics/notifications. The online environment has transformed sports betting into a faster and more harmful gambling mode.
Cahill 2025 [21]	Australia (Reddit data)	Netnography of a sports-betting community of practice on Reddit; social practice theory	Sports betting (online)	Mechanism (fintech)	Platformisation of sports betting (apps, APIs, platform design features)	Harmful consumption (no single financial metric)	Platformisation facilitates harmful sports betting by (1) intruding into work, time and the consumption of sport and (2) intensifying competition among consumers, industry and against consumers themselves; calls for policy to curb platform-facilitated harm.
Gbadegesin 2025 [78]	Nigeria	Cross-sectional survey; 300 respondents assessing access, determinants, and patronage of online sports betting	Online sports betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	ICT-enabled 24/7 online access to betting via internet-connected devices; ease of physical and digital access to betting locations	Betting to earn money among low-income students (below N30,000); negative psychological and financial implications for youth	Most respondents were young adults aged 18–28, predominantly male with tertiary education, and about 79% were students with income below N30,000. About 51.7% had engaged in online betting to earn money or other benefits, while 48.3% had not. Online betting is popular, and physical access to betting locations is relatively easy for most respondents.
Coffey 2026 [25]	Australia (NSW)	Qualitative; in-depth semi-structured interviews with young men	Sports betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial	“Bet-with-mates: app features; continuous smartphone affordances; marketing invoking sport’s community feel	Financialization of everyday life; everyday indebtedness (experiential)	Betting apps are woven into young men’s mundane social/digital lives and hetero-masculine sporting/drinking cultures; digital affordances push gambling beyond the betting shop into intimate everyday spaces; framed as financialization and everyday indebtedness.
Heirene 2026 [79]	Australia	Survey linked to objective account data; 1647 participants from two online wagering sites (PGSI and Gambling Harm Measure)	Online sports and race betting	Mechanism (fintech) · Financial · Governance	Online wagering behavioural indicators (deposit frequency, spend, percentage of household income, number of sports/races bet on, number of accounts)	Lower-risk limits: no more than 2% of pre-tax household income per month, no more than four deposits per month	ROC curve analyses identified optimal threshold values across eight behavioural indicators, with all except gambling frequency showing acceptable AUC values (≥0.6). A dose–response relationship was observed whereby surpassing more limits was associated with greater odds of reporting harm. Proposed lower-risk guidelines include no more than four deposits per month, depositing no more than 2% of pre-tax household income, using no more than two sites/apps, and betting on four or fewer types of sports/races.
Category C—Financial wellbeing, financial harm & vulnerability (n = 6)
Hing 2019 [80]	Australia	Ecological momentary assessment (EMA); baseline survey of 320 regular sports bettors and 402 regular race bettors, followed by 15 EMA surveys over 3 weeks	Sports betting and race betting (wagering)	Financial	Contextual/behavioural characteristics of high spenders (online betting, multiple betting accounts, betting when affected by alcohol)	Higher betting expenditure (financial outlay); problem gamblers spent 3–4 times more than non-problem gamblers, moderate-risk 2–3 times more	Higher-spending bettors were more likely to be male, bet online, have higher disposable incomes, have commenced betting younger, hold more betting accounts, and bet when affected by alcohol. The analyses confirmed a strong link between problem-gambling severity and financial outlay, with problem-gambling sports bettors spending four times more and race bettors three times more than non-problem counterparts. Regulatory initiatives helping bettors limit or reduce their financial outlay should be central to harm minimisation.
Vinberg 2021 [81]	Sweden	Qualitative interview study using content analysis; 30 male elite athletes, coaches and sports managers across four sports	Elite sport/sports betting	Financial · Governance	Gambling sponsorship of sport, normalisation of gambling within male elite sport, financial connections between sport and gambling industry	Concerns about money and problem gambling; money framed as reward and reason for gambling	Two main themes emerged: a desire for and concerns about money, and gambling “in the shadow of performance”, with money and status seen as central. Gambling was identified as normalised within male elite sport at all socio-ecological levels. Preventing gambling problems requires action across management, coaches and athletes and greater knowledge of gambling.
Constandt 2022 [82]	Belgium	Cross-sectional online survey, 817 sports club actors	Sports betting (sports clubs; football/soccer emphasised)	Financial · Governance	Normalisation of gambling in sports clubs (availability, accessibility, socio-cultural accommodation); lack of formal rules/education	Problem gambling (associated debts noted as harm)	Being male, aged 26–35, and involved in football were linked to higher problem-gambling levels. Sports betting was especially normalised within sports clubs given its prevalence and frequent discussion. Respondents reported a widespread lack of formal rules (96%) and education initiatives (98.7%) on gambling and supported regulatory and educational measures to denormalise gambling.
Marionneau 2023 [23]	Finland	Analysis of objective bank transaction data of N = 23,231 indebted individuals (debt consolidation applicants), 2018–2021	Sports betting (alongside casino and lottery gambling)	Financial · Mechanism (fintech)	Online gambling deposits via third-party payment services (Trustly, Pluspay, Euteller); easy access to unsecured instant loans/consumer credit	Gambling losses concentrated among heavy gamblers; individuals with unsecured debt lose more; median past-year balance negative (−1476 euros)	Gambling is widespread among indebted individuals in Finland, with spending highly concentrated—nearly half (49.5%) of deposits from the top 5% of spenders. Individuals with unsecured loans had higher median gambling losses than those without, indicating gambling and indebtedness are strongly linked. Casino-type gambling was most popular, with sports betting making up ~30% of categorised gambling spending.
Hing 2026 [83]	Australia	Qualitative interview study; 50 young adults aged 18–25 reporting moderate/high sports betting harm; thematic analysis	Online sports betting (including via smartphone)	Financial · Mechanism (marketing)	Normalisation of sports betting in youth culture; marketing representations conflicting with “addicted” stereotypes; harm accumulation masked by normalised betting	Multidimensional harm including financial harm (losses); change strategies included budgeting, setting limits, deleting betting apps and closing accounts	Findings highlighted the multidimensional nature of harm across financial, emotional, vocational, relationship and health domains, with rapid accumulation of harm masked by normalised sports betting. Realising signs of addiction shook participants’ self-image as their stereotypes of “addicted” gamblers conflicted with marketing representations of betting as “quirky and cool”. Most change strategies entailed self-help such as budgeting, setting limits and deleting apps; measures are needed to reverse normalisation and improve consumer protection and help-seeking.
Baker 2026 [4]	USA	Quasi-experimental difference-in-differences on household financial-transaction data; 183,821 households; state legalisation	Sports betting (online)	Financial · Mechanism (fintech) · Governance	Legalisation of online/mobile sports betting; frictionless app betting	Savings, investment (brokerage deposits), spending, consumer debt	Sports betting cuts savings and crowds out investment (brokerage deposits −~56% among frequent bettors) and raises consumer debt; harms concentrate in frequent bettors and low-savings/vulnerable households; not a generic consumption effect (placebo test).
Category D—Governance & responsible-consumption responses (n = 4)
Hancock 2018 [84]	Australia	Corporate political activity (CPA) framework analysis of gambling-industry submissions to the 2013 Parliamentary inquiry	Sports betting (TV advertising)	Governance · Mechanism (marketing)	Industry lobbying/CPA strategies opposing regulation of TV sports-betting advertising	—	Industry used tobacco-style CPA strategies (shaping evidence base, financial-incentive, constituency-building, policy-substitution, legal, fragmentation) plus a “CSR/responsibility” strategy; reinforced individual-choice/blame framing to secure self-regulation and avoid government regulation.
Dietrich 2023 [85]	Australia	Legal/doctrinal analysis of Australian regulatory landscape for gambling advertising	Sports and esports gambling advertising (sports betting/wagering)	Governance · Mechanism (marketing)	Advertising of gambling via broadcast, signage, branding, and sponsorship of sporting events	—	Australian gambling regulation contains significant gaps that allow providers to target consumers of sport (especially young people) and embed gambling into sports culture. The 2018 advertising reforms failed to curb marketing during live sport. The article proposes legal reforms including bans on advertising on public roads/transport, near schools, during breaks/highlights/replays, and via signage and sponsorship.
Newall 2023 [86]	Multiple	Narrative/conceptual review of safer gambling messaging drawing on other gambling formats and public-health literature (tobacco, alcohol)	Race and sports betting	Governance	Safer gambling messages/warning labels (e.g., “gamble responsibly”, “keep the fun in the game”) and five proposed messaging themes	—	There is no strong evidence supporting current safer gambling messages such as “gamble responsibly”, which may backfire via negative psychological reactance. Five areas for further messaging research are proposed: teaching safer practices, correcting misperceptions, boosting conscious decision-making, norm-based messages, and emotional messages. Message design must account for individual differences and the higher skill element in race/sports betting.
Weston 2025 [87]	Canada	Media content analysis of 146 Canadian newspaper print articles before (Jan 2020-June 2021) and after (July 2021-Dec 2022) Bill C-218	Single-event/in-play sports betting	Governance	Media portrayal/framing of sports betting legalisation; coding of seven themes and voices (industry, academics, lived experience)	—	Dominant themes in coverage were legality (85.6%) and industry change (83.6%), while gambling harm and reform were represented in fewer than a quarter of articles. Industry representatives were the most frequent voices (70.5%), with few voices from academics, treatment providers, or people with lived experience of harm. Canadian media emphasised corporate and economic impacts over risks of harm from expanding sports betting.

The evidence is also strikingly concentrated in a handful of settings (Figure 3). Australia alone accounts for 32 studies (46%) and the United Kingdom for 13 (19%)—together almost two-thirds of the corpus—with a further ten studies being multi-country or conceptual works without a single national setting. Beyond these, the geography thins to a long tail of individual contributions: Canada (three); the United States, Belgium and Nigeria (two each); and China, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Zimbabwe (one each). Whole regions are effectively absent—most conspicuously Southeast Europe and the Balkans, but also the greater part of Asia and Latin America—a geographic gap that both limits the transferability of current evidence and marks a clear opportunity for research in under-represented markets.

Figure 3. Characteristics of the 69 included studies, by year of publication, country/region, review dimension (studies may span more than one), and study design.

Yet these counts must be read with care. The number of studies from a country is a map of research activity, not of gambling itself: it reflects where sports-betting research has been funded, conducted, and published in English, rather than where betting is most prevalent or most harmful. A region’s near-absence from the map may therefore signal not the absence of gambling but its relative invisibility—where betting is informal, unregulated, or simply under-researched, or where it is legally restricted and so less openly examined. The pronounced concentration in Australia and the United Kingdom is thus best understood as evidence of vigorous research communities and acute policy attention in those settings (and, in part, the review’s English-language and database scope), not as a claim that their populations gamble more than others; conversely, the silence over much of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Southeastern Europe reflects gaps in the research gaze rather than proof that the phenomenon is absent there.

In terms of the sporting context, most studies (39) treated sports betting in general terms; among those focused on a specific sport, football/soccer was dominant (17 studies), followed by racing, usually examined alongside sports betting (10), and esports betting (2). Football’s prominence reflects the concentration of gambling sponsorship and advertising research in European and Australian football codes.

Methodologically, the corpus is encouragingly diverse, and each study was assigned to a single primary design category: qualitative studies (17), experimental and ecological momentary assessment designs (15), review articles (11), surveys (10), conceptual and policy analyses (seven), advertising content analyses (five), studies drawing on secondary or behavioural-tracking data (three), and one study of mixed/other design (one)—69 in total. These design categories are mutually exclusive; the review dimensions reported below are not, as a study may address more than one.

Finally, and most tellingly for the review’s purpose, the studies distribute unevenly across its guiding dimensions (studies may address more than one). The marketing mechanism dominates: 52 of the 69 studies (75%) examine the advertising, sponsorship, or promotional embedding of betting in sport. The financial-wellbeing dimension appears in 34 studies (49%), though frequently by way of marketing-driven overspend rather than direct measures of debt or household finance, while governance features in 24 (35%) and the distinctive fintech-affordance dimension in only 21 (30%) (Figure 3). The marketing literature is thus the well-developed backbone of the field, whereas the fintech and financial pillars—and above all their intersection, where the technology of the betting product meets the financial lives of fans—remain comparatively thin. This imbalance is the central empirical finding of the mapping and the gap the review’s agenda addresses.

3.2. The Marketing Embedding of Gambling in Sport

The largest and most mature body of evidence concerns the marketing channel of gamblification—the many ways in which betting is made visible, desirable, and ordinary within the sporting experience. Three intertwined strands are apparent.

The first strand is sponsorship. A substantial group of studies documents the saturation of sport by gambling sponsorship and the tensions it creates. Analyses of shirt-front and pitch-side sponsorship in British and Australian football describe its rapid growth and global reach and question the propriety of a health-harming product underwriting the game [2,5,6]. Conceptual and stakeholder work frames this as a governance dilemma—clubs’ financial dependence on betting revenue set against the harm to fans and communities [39,49,60]—while experimental and content-analytic studies show how sponsorship shapes betting intentions and reaches even children, who readily recall gambling brands on jerseys [11,46,54]. A recent review consolidates this sponsorship literature into a coherent field [15].

The second strand is advertising content and symbolic appeal, which dissects the persuasive architecture of wagering advertising itself. Content analyses reveal a repertoire of symbolic appeals—fan rituals, mateship, masculinity, winning, thrill, and social belonging—that align betting with the culturally valued meanings of sport and mirror the tactics once used to sell tobacco and alcohol [7,8,13,48]. Frequency analyses of live broadcasts confirm the sheer density of this marketing in and around the game [46,56].

Inducements and direct marketing, the third and rapidly growing strand, examines the “bonus” architecture of wagering—sign-up offers, bonus bets, boosted odds, refer-a-friend schemes, and personalised push messages. Studies document the structural features of these inducements and the difficulty bettors have in comprehending their true cost [9,43,71], and, crucially, point to their behavioural and financial consequences: exposure to advertising and inducements increases betting expenditure and unplanned spending, prompts poorer wagering decisions, and does so most strongly among those already experiencing problems [45,53,64,65,66,70].

Running through all three strands is the theme of normalisation—the quiet redefinition of betting as a natural, even expected, part of following sport. Qualitative and survey work shows this normalisation operating powerfully among young men, for whom betting becomes woven into the sociality of fandom [40,42,55,57,68], and reaching into adolescence and childhood through the sport–gambling nexus [11,12,63]. It extends even to athletes and coaches, among whom gambling is similarly normalised within male sporting culture [86], and it is now embedded institutionally through sports clubs themselves [82].

3.3. The Fintech Affordances of the Betting Product

A smaller but conceptually distinct body of work turns from the marketing of betting to the design of the betting product—the fintech affordances that define the contemporary form. Several studies theorise the underlying transformation: the shift of sports betting from a discrete, event-bound wager into a rapid and continuous activity, propelled by smartphone access, live in-play and micro-event markets, cash-out features, instant deposits, and gamified interfaces [17,18,19,20]. A scoping study of in-play betting and a review of the structural characteristics of fixed-odds products map these features systematically and link them to elevated harm potential [18,19,20].

A parallel strand examines platformisation and the app itself as a site of consumption. Netnographic and qualitative work shows how digital platforms intrude betting into work, time, and the very act of watching sport, intensifying competitive engagement and folding wagering into the mundane, ever-present textures of everyday digital life [21,25,59]. Interview and behavioural studies connect specific affordances to harm—the situational features of smartphone betting and the cash-out function of in-play markets are each associated with more intensive and more harmful play [1,75,77]—while broader accounts trace how structural changes in the online product have reshaped the experience and behaviour of bettors [50]. Together these studies characterise the fintech affordances as a distinct mechanism of harm in their own right, entangled with but separable from marketing. This characterisation rests, however, largely on cross-sectional, qualitative, and theoretical work, and few studies isolate a single affordance experimentally, so it is best read as strongly suggestive rather than demonstrated.

3.4. Financial-Wellbeing Outcomes and the Vulnerabilities That Shape Them

The review’s headline concern—the financial wellbeing of those who bet on sport—is addressed by a smaller and more recent cluster, but one anchored by a small number of studies drawing on more direct financial data. The most direct evidence comes from large-scale financial-data analyses: using household transaction data, Baker et al. [4] show that legalised online sports betting reduces savings, crowds out investment, and increases consumer debt, with effects concentrated among frequent bettors and low-savings households; bank-transaction studies similarly locate sports betting within the finances of indebted individuals [23]. A second route to financial outcomes runs through marketing: several studies show that advertising and inducements translate into measurable expenditure and unplanned spending and that betting outlay rises steeply with problem-gambling severity [45,47,53,66,70].

In charting financial outcomes we distinguished directly measured financial indicators—debt, savings, household transactions, and account-level losses drawn from objective records—from the more common indirect proxies: self-reported betting expenditure, behavioural intentions, and problem-gambling severity. These categories are reported separately, and their cross-tabulation against the fintech affordances (Section 3.6, Table 2) shows that directly measured financial outcomes remain rare, appearing in only five of the sixty-nine studies.

Beyond these behavioural–financial measures, qualitative work reframes the phenomenon as a financialization of everyday life, in which betting apps become entangled with young men’s social worlds and with everyday forms of indebtedness [25]. A distinct and important sub-strand, and one that speaks directly to the sustainability framing, concerns vulnerability in lower-income and developing-economy settings: studies from Nigeria and Zimbabwe examine sports betting as an economic-survival strategy and a channel of financial risk among unemployed and low-income young people, connecting it explicitly to access, ICT, and the Sustainable Development Goals [63,76,78].

Across these outcomes, a recurring pattern of moderation by vulnerability is observed, although—resting largely on cross-sectional and self-report designs—it is best read as a robust association rather than an established causal moderation. Financial harm is repeatedly shown to fall most heavily on younger men, on those with fewer financial resources, and on those already experiencing gambling problems—the same groups most exposed to, and most responsive to, marketing and the frictionless design of the product [4,25,53,78]. Vulnerability thus appears not incidental to the pathway but central to it, even as its precise causal role awaits stronger longitudinal test.

3.5. Governance and Responsible-Consumption Responses

The final theme concerns the responses the literature proposes. At the level of regulation, studies analyse the contested politics of restricting gambling advertising in sport—including the gambling industry’s tobacco-style corporate political activity to resist it—and the legal architecture available to govern it [84,85], while media-framing work shows how the public narrative around sports-betting legalisation has emphasised economic benefit over harm [87]. At the level of consumer protection, a set of studies evaluates responsible-gambling tools applied to sports bettors—deposit limits, limit-setting prompts, in-play self-regulation strategies, and empirically derived lower-risk betting guidelines—with generally modest but real protective effects [29,72,73,75], alongside proposals to redesign safer-gambling messaging for race and sports betting specifically [86]. Finally, stakeholder and fan-facing studies register broad support for restricting gambling sponsorship and marketing in sport, tempered by awareness of clubs’ financial reliance on it [49,52,60]. The recurring conclusion is that individual-level “responsible gambling” measures are necessary but insufficient and that structural, marketing-, and product-level regulation is required to protect fan financial wellbeing as proposed within the peer-reviewed literature mapped here.

3.6. The Under-Mapped Intersection

Read as a whole, the evidence maps unevenly onto the review’s conceptual framework (Figure 1). The marketing channel is richly populated and the governance response well theorised; the fintech channel is distinct but thinner; and the financial-wellbeing outcome, though anchored by a few studies with more direct financial measures, is most often reached indirectly, through marketing-driven expenditure rather than through direct measures of debt, savings, or household financial stability. Critically, the intersection at the centre of the framework—where the fintech affordances of the betting product meet the financial lives of fans and where vulnerability concentrates the harm—is occupied by only a handful of studies [4,17,21,25,77].

To make the review’s central finding concrete, we cross-tabulated the presence of a fintech affordance against the type of financial outcome actually measured (Table 2). Directly measured financial outcomes—objective indicators such as debt, savings, brokerage deposits, account-level net losses, or bank-transaction data—appear in only five of the 69 studies [4,23,72,73,79] and in every case within the online/fintech channel, since such data are generated there; no study outside the fintech channel employed a direct financial measure. The remaining studies that touch financial wellbeing reach it only indirectly—through self-reported betting expenditure, problem-gambling severity, behavioural intentions, or qualitative accounts of hardship. This figure of five studies in sixty-nine is the empirical “thin core” the review foregrounds: the intersection at which a specific product affordance is connected to an objectively measured financial outcome remains almost entirely unoccupied. It is this conspicuous thinness at the core, rather than any absence at the edges, that constitutes the central finding of the mapping and frames the research agenda set out in the Discussion.

Table 2. Cross-tabulation of fintech affordance against directly measured financial outcome across the 69 included studies. “Directly measured” denotes objective financial indicators (debt, savings, brokerage deposits, account-level net losses, or bank-transaction data) as distinct from self-reported expenditure, problem-gambling indicators, intentions, or qualitative accounts.

	Directly Measured Financial Outcome	No Direct Financial Measure	Total
Fintech Affordance Present	5	16	21
Fintech Affordance Absent	0	48	48
Total	5	64	69

Table 2. Cross-tabulation of fintech affordance against directly measured financial outcome across the 69 included studies. “Directly measured” denotes objective financial indicators (debt, savings, brokerage deposits, account-level net losses, or bank-transaction data) as distinct from self-reported expenditure, problem-gambling indicators, intentions, or qualitative accounts.

	Directly Measured Financial Outcome	No Direct Financial Measure	Total
Fintech Affordance Present	5	16	21
Fintech Affordance Absent	0	48	48
Total	5	64	69

3.7. Co-Occurrence of Review Dimensions and Their Evolution over Time

Beyond the frequency of each review dimension, two further patterns illuminate the internal structure of the field. The first concerns how the dimensions co-occur within individual studies (Figure 4A). Marketing, the dominant dimension, most often accompanies financial-wellbeing concerns (21 studies) and governance (17), reflecting a mature literature that ties advertising and sponsorship both to spending and to calls for regulation. The most telling association, however, is the comparatively tight coupling of the fintech and financial dimensions: of the 21 studies addressing fintech affordances, fourteen also engage financial wellbeing—the single strongest cross-theme link in the corpus, and the empirical seam along which the review’s central “thin core” lies. Fintech and governance, by contrast, rarely meet (four studies), signalling that the regulation of the betting product’s design remains largely untheorised.

Figure 4. Co-occurrence and temporal evolution of the four review dimensions across the 69 included studies. (A) Co-occurrence matrix: diagonal cells give the number of studies addressing each dimension; off-diagonal cells give the number addressing both. (B) Share of each period’s studies addressing each dimension (studies may address more than one).

The second pattern concerns change over time (Figure 4B). Expressed as a share of each period’s output, the marketing dimension, though still dominant, has receded steadily—from around nine in ten of the earliest studies to roughly two-thirds of the most recent—while the financial-wellbeing dimension has risen markedly, from a third of early studies to well over half of those published since 2023. The fintech dimension has grown more modestly but consistently, and governance has fluctuated. The trajectory is unmistakable: the field is maturing outward from its marketing origins toward the financial and technological concerns at the heart of this review, even as the intersection of the two remains sparsely populated.

4. Discussion

4.1. Principal Findings

This scoping review assembled 69 studies to map how the gamblification of sport—in both its marketing and its fintech dimensions—relates to the financial wellbeing of fans. Three findings stand out. First, the field is young, expanding rapidly, and heavily concentrated in Australia and the United Kingdom. Second, it is weighted decisively toward the marketing channel of gamblification: three-quarters of the studies examine advertising, sponsorship, inducements, or normalisation, and this literature is now mature and internally coherent—a coherence that rests on a substantial body of primary studies as well as several overlapping reviews. Third, and most consequentially, the review’s headline concern—the financial wellbeing of sport audiences and its connection to the fintech affordances of the betting product—is comparatively thin, and the intersection at the very centre of the framework—the redesigned product’s bearing on fans’ financial lives—is occupied by only a handful of studies. In short, the field has examined the marketing of sports betting far more closely than its financial consequences.

A note on how we read this evidence is in order. Because a formal appraisal of study quality was not undertaken (Section 2.8), we distinguish throughout between association, experimental evidence, and conceptual argument rather than ranking studies by strength: the firmest causal evidence on financial outcomes comes from a small number of quasi-experimental and transaction-data studies [4,70], whereas much of the marketing literature is cross-sectional, self-report, or content-analytic. We are likewise careful to separate evidence specific to sports betting from evidence on gambling in general—several of the strongest financial and societal-cost figures invoked here derive from general-gambling populations and are cited to indicate the order of magnitude within which sport-embedded betting sits, not as sports-betting-specific effects. Marionneau et al. [23], for instance, examine indebtedness across gambling forms—including casino and lottery play—with sports betting analysed as one channel among several, so such work frames the sport-betting case rather than measuring it.

4.2. What This Review Adds

Existing syntheses have illuminated the marketing dimension with real rigour, but they have done so within tightly bounded terms: advertising as the exposure and gambling behaviour or attitudes as the outcome [13,14,15,16]. Broader harm frameworks, for their part, treat gambling as a generic activity, without attending to the specific technology of its delivery [32]. The present review makes three distinct contributions. It synthesises the fintech affordances of sports betting—apps, live in-play and micro-betting, cash-out, embedded payments—as a mechanism of harm in their own right, distinct from marketing; it draws together the financial wellbeing of fans, rather than their gambling behaviour, as the outcome of interest; and it reads the whole phenomenon through the lens of the social sustainability of sport, connecting it to the responsible-consumption and inequality concerns of the Sustainable Development agenda. To our knowledge, these three threads have not previously been brought together in a single synthesis—a novelty that lies as much in their integration as in any one of them alone.

These three contributions cohere into a single theoretical proposition. We define fintech-era gamblification as the fusion of two channels—the marketing embedding of betting in sport and the fintech redesign of the betting product—into a continuous, frictionless, and seamlessly financed form of consumption, and we position it as a commercial determinant of the social sustainability of sport. The model that formalises this proposition (Figure 1) draws together three literature types that have hitherto run largely in parallel: the commercial determinants of health, which locate harm in the design and marketing practices of industry rather than in individual choice; the financialization of everyday life, which explains how digital finance folds risk into mundane routines; and the social-sustainability strand of the sustainability agenda, with its concern for equity, wellbeing, and responsible consumption. Read together, they reframe fan financial wellbeing not as a private behavioural outcome but as a structural, distributional, and intergenerational property of sport itself—produced upstream, by the architecture of the product and its promotion, and felt downstream, across households, communities, and the Sustainable Development Goals. This integrative framing, rather than any single mechanism or outcome, is the review’s principal theoretical contribution.

4.3. The Fintech Turn and the Thin Core

The most striking pattern is a paradox. The very feature that defines contemporary sports betting—its transformation into a continuous, app-based, seamlessly financed, quasi-investment activity [3,17,21]—is precisely what makes its consequences financial. When a wager embeds a financial claim within an entertainment experience, and when the friction between impulse and expenditure all but disappears, the harms that follow settle in savings, debt, and household stability [4,25]. Yet the evidence connecting the design of the fintech product directly to financial outcomes remains sparse: most studies reach financial wellbeing indirectly, through marketing-driven overspend, and the most directly measured financial evidence (from transaction and banking data) rarely isolates the specific product affordances responsible. The literature has, as it were, described the new machine and counted the money, but has seldom traced the wires between them. This gap is not a marginal omission; it is the empirical centre the field has yet to occupy.

4.4. Financial Wellbeing, Vulnerability, and the Social Sustainability of Sport

A second consistent pattern is the concentration of harm. Across designs and settings, financial harm falls most heavily on younger men, on those with fewer resources, and on those already at risk—the same groups most exposed and most responsive to marketing and to the frictionless product [4,53,78,88]. Vulnerability is therefore not incidental but constitutive of the pathway, and this is what makes gamblification a question of sustainability rather than merely of individual choice. Gambling is an atypical consumer product, inherently risky even when experienced as pleasurable [30]; when it is embedded in sport and delivered through frictionless digital finance, it bears directly on responsible consumption (SDG 12), on health and wellbeing (SDG 3), and on the socio-economic inequalities that harm both reflects and deepens (SDG 10). The financial wellbeing of sport’s audiences is, in this sense, part of the social sustainability of sport itself—a framing that the sports-gambling literature has not, to our knowledge, previously adopted, and one that a developing-economy sub-strand of the evidence makes especially vivid [63,76,78].

Mapped onto the dimensions of social sustainability, the review’s findings arrange themselves with some clarity. The equity dimension—the insistence that benefits and burdens be fairly distributed (SDG 10)—is engaged by the review’s most directly measured financial evidence, which indicates that harm settles disproportionately on younger, poorer, and already vulnerable households while revenue accrues to operators, leagues, and clubs [4,22,88]. The wellbeing dimension (SDG 3) is engaged wherever financial distress spills beyond the ledger into mental health, relationships, and the everyday security of the home, as the transaction-data and survey evidence on gambling more broadly repeatedly documents [22,23,24]. The responsible-consumption dimension (SDG 12) is engaged most directly by the fintech affordances themselves: a product deliberately designed to dissolve the friction between impulse and expenditure sits in evident tension with the ideal of informed, moderated consumption, and it is precisely this tension that the emerging apparatus of affordability checks and financial-risk assessments attempts to govern [29]. And a fourth, less codified dimension—the trust and communal integrity on which sport as a shared cultural institution depends—is quietly drawn down each time the commercial architecture of the game redistributes financial risk toward the supporters whose loyalty sustains it [1,25]. Taken together, these dimensions reframe fan financial wellbeing not as a private matter of self-control but as a shared, institutional, and intergenerational concern—which is precisely the register in which this framing is meant to be read. It should be stressed that this mapping onto the Sustainable Development Goals is our interpretive framing rather than a claim made by the studies themselves. Few of the included studies invoke the SDGs directly—the developing-economy sub-strand [63,76,78] is the exception—and the equity, wellbeing, and responsible-consumption labels are ours, laid over evidence gathered for other purposes. What the studies supply is the substance beneath those labels: distributional outcomes are assessed where harm is shown to concentrate by income and vulnerability [4,22,88]; health and relational spillovers where financial distress is linked to wellbeing [23,24]; and responsible consumption where the frictionless product and its governance are examined [19,29]. The SDG framing organises this evidence and gives it a common vocabulary; it does not add to it, and the intermediate step from a mapped finding to a normative conclusion is one we make explicit rather than assume.

These harms, moreover, do not remain with the individual bettor. Social sustainability is, by its very nature, a relational concern, and the financial consequences of gamblification radiate outward through a wider web of stakeholders—the households and families who absorb the depleted savings and the mounting debts, the employers and workplaces touched by the associated absenteeism, diminished productivity, and unemployment, and the clubs and communities whose social fabric is bound up with the game. The evidence on affected others is sobering: a person experiencing gambling problems is estimated to harm, on average, some six other people—partners, children, relatives, friends, and colleagues [89]—so that the distributional question at the heart of SDG 10 concerns not only who gambles but who bears the cost. Household-level analyses render this concrete: intensive gambling is associated with missed mortgage and credit-card payments, greater reliance on high-cost credit, diminished savings, and a financial distress that settles across the whole household rather than the individual account [4,22]—the latter drawn from general-gambling transaction data. At the societal scale the aggregate burden is substantial: Public Health England estimated the economic and social cost of gambling-related harm in England alone at approximately £1.27 billion in a single year [90], a figure that, while spanning all forms of gambling rather than sport betting specifically, indicates the order of magnitude within which the harms mapped here sit. One stakeholder group, however, remains conspicuously under-examined—the small-business owners and local economies into which betting losses are quietly absorbed—and its near-absence from the evidence is itself a finding, marking a dimension of social sustainability that future research would do well to map.

The governance evidence reinforces this reading. Studies of responsible-gambling tools—deposit limits, limit-setting prompts, and lower-risk guidelines—report modest but real protective effects [29,72,73], yet the recurring conclusion is that such individual-level measures are necessary but insufficient. The weight of the evidence points instead toward structural responses: the regulation of advertising and sponsorship [84,85], the redesign of the product itself, and the emerging apparatus of affordability checks and financial-risk assessments built on open-banking infrastructure [29]. These emerging instruments should not, however, be presented as settled solutions. The effectiveness of affordability checks and financial-risk assessments is as yet largely unevaluated, and they carry genuine trade-offs: they rely on intrusive open-banking data and so raise liberty and privacy concerns [30]; set clumsily, blanket income thresholds may fall regressively on lower-income bettors or displace play toward unregulated markets; and their distributional consequences—precisely who is protected and who is excluded—have not been independently assessed. Read through a social-sustainability lens, this is not a minor caveat but part of the argument: a measure intended to advance equity can undercut it if its own distributional effects go unexamined. We therefore commend these instruments cautiously and flag the independent evaluation of their effectiveness and their equity effects as a priority (Section 4.5).

4.5. Deficiencies in the Evidence and Implications for Research

Before setting out directions for future work, it is worth naming the recurring deficiencies in the existing evidence that those directions are designed to remedy—for these are weaknesses in the chain of inference, not merely gaps in coverage. First, the field leans heavily on cross-sectional, self-report designs, frequently drawn from Australian convenience samples, which can establish association but not causation—a limitation the primary literature itself concedes [51]. Second, and most consequentially, financial wellbeing is more often inferred than measured: many studies reach it indirectly, through marketing-driven expenditure or through problem-gambling indices such as the PGSI, thereby conflating how much is spent, or how disordered the play, with the downstream realities of debt, depleted savings, and household instability; and even the strongest financial evidence, drawn from transaction and banking data, seldom isolates which specific product affordance is responsible. Third, the near-absence of the fintech–governance pairing (Section 3.7) means that the regulation of the betting product’s design, as distinct from its advertising, remains largely untheorised. Fourth, the concentration of evidence in a few high-income, English-speaking jurisdictions limits both its transferability and its capacity to speak to the settings where vulnerability may be most acute. These deficiencies frame the agenda that follows.

The mapping yields a clear agenda. Most urgently, research is needed at the under-mapped core—studies that connect specific fintech affordances (in-play markets, cash-out, micro-betting, embedded payments) directly to financial-wellbeing outcomes, ideally using transaction-level or open-banking data and longitudinal or quasi-experimental designs capable of supporting causal inference, following [4,22]. Second, the striking geographic concentration of the evidence in Australia and the UK limits its transferability and calls for research in the many under-represented settings—most conspicuously Southeast Europe and the Balkans, but also much of Asia and Latin America—where betting cultures, regulatory regimes, and vulnerabilities differ markedly. Third, the field would benefit from greater interdisciplinary integration, bringing the tools of household finance and economics to bear on questions that have largely been studied through public-health and marketing lenses. Fourth, the mapping reveals an almost complete silence on the wider circle of those affected—the partners, children, and households who absorb the harm, and its ripple into workplaces, small businesses, and local economies—a stakeholder dimension that, in the sport-betting context specifically, remains virtually unexamined and merits dedicated study. Finally, the governance instruments now being deployed—particularly affordability checks—require independent evaluation of their effectiveness and their distributional consequences.

4.6. Implications for Policy and Practice

For policymakers and sporting bodies, the review’s central implication is that protecting fan financial wellbeing cannot rest on individual responsibility alone. The balance of the evidence—though largely observational and drawn in significant part from cross-sectional self-report—points toward a shift of emphasis toward structural measures: restrictions on gambling advertising and sponsorship in sport, attention to the harmful design features of the betting product, and financial-risk or affordability safeguards. Because the review maps an unappraised body of evidence spanning cross-sectional self-report, qualitative, observational, experimental, and review designs—which provide different types and levels of evidence—these implications are offered as our interpretation of recurring findings and policy proposals, not as graded conclusions about the certainty or effectiveness of specific interventions; establishing the latter would require the formal critical appraisal that lies beyond the scope of a scoping review. These governance observations map the peer-reviewed literature rather than the complete regulatory evidence base. Regulatory evaluations, government consultations, enforcement reports, and industry codes were not formally charted (Section 2.4) and may contain substantial further evidence on responsible-gambling and governance measures. Accordingly, the structural measures highlighted here—advertising and sponsorship restrictions, product-design controls, and affordability or financial-risk safeguards—are identified as priorities for independent evaluation, not as interventions this review establishes as effective. For sporting organisations specifically, the tension between betting-derived revenue and the wellbeing of supporters—documented repeatedly in the sponsorship literature [49,60]—is a sustainability question that merits explicit governance rather than tacit acceptance.

4.7. Strengths and Limitations

The review’s strengths lie in its breadth, its transparency, and its adherence to PRISMA-ScR reporting: it searched three databases, supplemented by hand-searching and a Google Scholar sweep; it screened and charted every record independently, in duplicate and in most cases triplicate; and it imposed no geographic or sport-type restriction, allowing the geographic and thematic gaps to emerge as findings.

Several limitations temper its conclusions. The review was restricted to English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles and reviews; relevant work in other languages, in grey literature, or in book and conference formats was not captured, as well as articles from inaccessible databases, though targeted supplementary searches were undertaken, and a small number of pivotal public-health and regulatory reports were consulted to contextualise the findings (see Section 2.4) to mitigate this. In keeping with scoping-review methodology, the individual studies were not formally appraised for quality, so the map describes the extent and nature of the evidence rather than its strength. Finally, some deliberate scope decisions—the focus on wagering rather than adjacent monetisation, the requirement that sports betting be examined separately within general-gambling studies, and the restriction of outcomes to the review’s three dimensions—will have excluded work that a differently bounded review might have included. The pronounced Australia/UK concentration probably reflects, in large part, a genuine concentration of research activity and policy attention in those settings; we cannot, however, fully exclude some contribution from the review’s restriction to English-language publications and from the databases that were not accessible, and this qualification should be borne in mind. As with any review, the process carries potential for selection, publication, language, and geographic bias; these were mitigated where possible through independent duplicate-to-triplicate screening and charting, resolution of disagreements by the two most experienced reviewers, and supplementary hand-searching and a Google Scholar sweep to offset the databases that were inaccessible. Formal inter-rater agreement statistics were not computed, with agreement being reached by consensus.

5. Conclusions

The gamblification of sport has entered a new, fintech-enabled phase, in which betting is no longer merely advertised around sport but designed into the very act of watching—continuous, mobile, frictionless, and seamlessly financed. This scoping review mapped how that transformation relates to the financial wellbeing of fans and found a field well developed at its edges but notably thin at its core. The marketing embedding of gambling in sport is well documented and its governance carefully theorised; the fintech affordances of the betting product form a distinct but smaller literature; and the financial wellbeing of fans—the outcome that matters most for the sustainability of sport—is most often reached only indirectly, through marketing-driven overspend rather than through direct evidence on debt, savings, and household stability. Only five of the 69 included studies directly measured a financial outcome. The intersection at the centre—product design and fan finances—remains largely unoccupied.

The review’s contribution is to name and map that intersection and to reframe it as a question of the social sustainability of sport, connected to responsible consumption, health and wellbeing, and the inequalities that gambling harm concentrates and deepens. To hold sport to a standard of social sustainability is to insist that the equity of who bears gambling’s financial burden (SDG 10), the wellbeing of those who carry it (SDG 3), and the responsibility designed—or left undesigned—into the product they consume (SDG 12) are not peripheral externalities but measures of whether sport can remain a shared and trusted good. Where a sport transfers financial risk onto its most committed and most vulnerable followers, it risks weakening the communities that sustain it and the trust on which its social value depends. Protecting fan financial wellbeing, the evidence suggests, will require more than appeals to individual responsibility; it points to the need for structural attention to the marketing, the product design, and the financial architecture of contemporary sports betting—an approach oriented to the longer-term sustainability of sport rather than to short-term revenue. Future research should occupy the empirical core the field has left open—linking fintech affordances directly to financial outcomes, in the diverse settings that current evidence has yet to reach. On the evidence mapped here, the financial wellbeing of sport’s audiences is closely bound up with the sustainability of sport itself.