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Football is a popular sport among young people across Africa, incited by the heavy presence of European football that has become central to youth cultures, everyday social routines, forms of consumption and opportunities for establishing social status. A growing body of evidence suggests increasing trends in harmful gambling behaviours in African youth, while the proliferation of football betting particularly remains a critical potential risk for negative mental health outcomes among young people in Sub-Saharan Africa. This chapter draws on original empirical data from a web-based cross-sectional survey to examine the prevalence estimates and associations of socio-demographic and behavioural factors with football betting among young adults attending university in Ghana. It draws on a multivariable logistic regression model to assess the associations with football betting. Our findings point not only to the growing salience of football betting among male demographics, but also the role of peer culture, alcohol and media as predominant sources of participants' initiation of football betting. Moreover, participants indicated the motive ‘to make money’ as their single major motivation, which raises the prospect that football betting is used as a means to mitigate the adverse effects of unemployment. Overall, the study points to a need for harm prevention strategies that align more closely with public health approaches focused on students, their families, their communities and their universities/schools.

Sports gambling has a very long history, evolving with and influencing cultures, classes, genders and races from antiquity until the present. Attempts to ban it have failed, with its problems regularly emerging in new forms. Given the still limited historiography, this chapter adopts a broad-brush, qualitative, socio-historical approach. It focuses on five themes: the change over time in the various sports betting systems, such as lotteries; the changing nature of social networks in terms of sports gambling; anti-gambling attitudes and their importance in shaping legislative attempts to control or suppress it; the changing regulation of sports betting; and the way identities such as class, age and gender impacted on sports gambling.

Despite increasingly persuasive women-focused marketing of gambling products, there has only been limited investigation around women sports betting. Men remain the focus of much of the conversation about sports betting as they have generally been found to be the most active sports bettors and the most at risk of experiencing harms associated with their behaviour. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring the characteristics of young women sports bettors in the United Kingdom and the relationship between sports betting and the experience of gambling harms. To do this, we created two models of analysis. Our analysis is based on data from the first wave (2019) of the Emerging Adults Gambling Survey (EAGS) dataset (n = 3,549). The EAGS is a non-probability longitudinal survey that includes individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 who were residents in Britain at the time of data collection. Firstly, we examined the associations between women sports bettors and several factors identified as important predictors of sports betting. Secondly, we sought to understand the relationship between women's sports betting and the harms associated with this activity. From these models, we found that women's sports betting was most reliably predicted according to fandom and peer influence. We also found that women sports bettors were more at risk of experiencing harms associated with difficulties with family and friends than women gamblers using other products.

Sports betting has become more prevalent, visible and socially accepted in Western liberal societies than ever before. This normalisation of gambling on sports has been fuelled by deregulation, the omnipresence of advertising and the growing dependency of elite sports on sponsorship revenue streams from the gambling industry. That said, much remains to be uncovered about the mechanisms through which this normalisation of gambling occurs in sports. This chapter focuses on the role of sports clubs in Belgium and the Netherlands, drawing on empirical insights from two related studies that examine the oft-neglected salience of integrity as a key factor shaping gambling-related policy and practice at the organisational level. This sets the stage for a critical research agenda that can support the denormalisation of gambling, and the deconstruction of dominant discourses that frame sports betting as a fun, risk-free social practice.

The rites and practices of folk religion in Nigeria cut across virtually all conventional and emerging social institutions in the country. The inability of the State to perform many of its functions has encouraged this trend, with many turning to folk religion and associated practices in attempts to control uncertain situations. Unemployed/underemployed young gamblers have begun to incorporate and normalise the combination of spiritual elements with sports betting activities in a bid to translate games of uncertainty into games of certainty. This study attempts to conceptualise how and why young people adopt, practice and make sense of folk religion in relation to sports betting.

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were used to interrogate and analyse the lived experiences of key actors living in the capital city of Ilorin, Kwara State, a place renowned for the widespread practice of folk religious rites: 20 unemployed/underemployed young sports bettors and 10 folk doctors. Collected data were transcribed manually and subjected to inductive content analysis, using grounded theory. The combination of folk religion with sports betting is fast becoming normalised as young Nigerians seek to survive harsh economic conditions. Adoption is also linked with belief in traditions, in-group conflicts, gambling adverts, lack of luck and greed. Folk religious practices combine elements from the natural and spiritual worlds. This study formulates concepts for understanding the complexity of such practices concerning gambling among young sports bettors in Nigeria.

Horse racing occupies a significant but separate part of sports gambling provision. The historical importance of horse breeding as well as employment effects have been used to justify the necessity of betting revenue in the horse sector. In the Nordic countries, these arguments are used to organise horse racing separately from other sports betting. In this context, horse racing, and particularly trotting, remains a lucrative sector for horse owners and producers of racing. The current study focuses on the production chains and financial interests behind horse racing in the Nordic countries. We use financial statements and annual reporting of Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish horse betting companies to determine who benefits financially from racing, what kind of production-related interests are involved and whether horse racing produces surplus to societies or merely maintains its own function. The results are discussed in light of the intertwined organisation of horse racing in the Nordics and the role of horses and animal welfare in the production of racing.