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1
Who uses custom sports betting products?
Philip W. S. Newall
1*
Rebecca Cassidy
2*
Lukasz Walasek
3
Elliot A. Ludvig
3
Caroline Meyer
4
1 Experimental Gambling Research Laboratory, School of Health, Medical and Applied
Sciences, CQUniversity, 120 Spencer St, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia
2 Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London,
SE14 6NW, United Kingdom
3 Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
4 Applied Psychology, WMG, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
* These authors contributed equally to the manuscript
Correspondence: Philip Newall, PhD, email: p.newall@cqu.edu.au
To be published in: Addiction Research & Theory
Funding sources: Funds for this study were obtained through the Goldsmiths Anthropology
Department Impact Fund.
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Matthew Rockloff for a number of helpful suggestions which
greatly improved the text.
2
Declaration of interest statement
In the last three years Philip Newall has contributed to research projects funded by
GambleAware, Gambling Research Australia, NSW Responsible Gambling Fund, and the
Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation. In 2019 Philip Newall received travel and
accommodation funding from the Spanish Federation of Rehabilitated Gamblers. In 2020
Philip Newall received an open access fee grant from Gambling Research Exchange Ontario.
Rebecca Cassidy has, in the past 3 years, received travel expenses from government
departments and from organisations which derive their funding from government departments
(including through hypothecated taxes on gambling) including the University of Helsinki
Centre for Research on Addiction, Control and Governance; the Alberta Gambling Research
Institute; the New Zealand Ministry of Health; the New Zealand Problem Gambling
Foundation and The Gambling and Addictions Research Centre at Auckland University of
Technology. Rebecca Cassidy also paid to attend industry-sponsored events and attended
free, industry-supported events in order to conduct anthropological fieldwork. Elliot Ludvig
was co-investigator on a grant funded by the Alberta Gambling Research Institute that ended
in February 2019. The other authors have no interests to declare.
3
Abstract
Background: The expansion of online gambling in the UK has been accompanied by an
increase in the number of novel betting products, particularly for soccer. The present research
investigates which types of sports bettors are the most likely to use novel gambling products
called ‘custom sports bets’ (CSBs), which allow gamblers to create their own unique bets.
Method: A large-scale, cross-sectional survey of online sports/horse racing bettors (N = 789,
32.7% female). The survey collected two measures of CSB usage and four validated
gambling measures: the Problem Gambling Severity Index, the Gambling Related Cognition
Illusion of Control Scale, the Short Gambling Harm Screen, and the Consumption Screen for
Problem Gambling.
Results: Overall, 62.0% of participants reported having used a CSB, and those who had used
a CSB did so on an average of 29.4 days over the last year. Overall, 16.0% of participants
who had used a CSB were current problem gamblers, compared to 6.7% among those who
had not. CSB users reported an average of 2.3 out of 10 possible gambling harms, compared
to 1.5 harms for those who had not used a CSB. The illusion of control scale was
significantly positively correlated with whether participants had ever used a CSB before, but
not with past year frequency of CSB usage. The usage of CSB products was most strongly
associated with the frequency of gambling consumption.
Conclusions: Overall, these findings suggest that CSB products raise distinctive concerns
around consumer protection for frequent sports bettors which deserve further investigation.
Keywords: gambling, problem gambling, gambling harm, gambling consumption
4
Introduction
The UK now has the world’s largest regulated online gambling market (McArthur,
2018), and this growth has been accompanied by an increase in the variety and availability of
sports betting products. Soccer betting is one of the most popular forms of gambling in the UK.
It has undergone radical change in recent years. In the 1990s, people who bet on UK soccer
matches could make only a very small number of bets before kick-off (Kuypers, 2000). Bets
had to be made either in person at a Licensed Betting Office (also known as a betting shop or
‘bookies’), or by telephone. Today, there are many more ways to bet, and not just on soccer,
but virtually any sporting event. Bookmakers in the UK will quote odds for hundreds of bets
for each soccer match before kick-off, and also permit bets to be placed during the course of a
match -- known as ‘in-play’ gambling. There is now empirical evidence suggesting that novel
gambling forms are most popular among those who exhibit signs of problem gambling
(LaPlante, Nelson, & Gray, 2014). A study of Spanish sports bettors, for example, has shown
a positive relationship between in-play sports betting and problem gambling severity (Lopez-
Gonzalez, Estévez, & Griffiths, 2018). Similarly, in Australia, researchers have found that
‘micro’ in-play bets placed on events occurring in the next few minutes of a sporting event are
used mostly by problem gamblers (Hing, Russell, Vitartas, & Lamont, 2016; Russell, Hing, Li,
& Vitartas, 2019; Russell, Hing, Browne, Li, & Vitartas, 2019).
There has also been a general shift in soccer betting towards offering bettors more ways
to bet at long odds (Newall, Thobhani, Walasek, & Meyer, 2019). This is notable given that
soccer bets at long odds have also been shown to have the highest bookmaker profit margins
(Hassanniakalager & Newall, 2019), and because problem gamblers are especially attracted to
bets at long odds (Kyonka & Schutte, 2018). Long odds usually lead to the gambler losing
small amounts of money (Feess, Müller, & Schumacher, 2014), offer what professional
gamblers would refer to as ‘poor value’ (Potts, 2004), and can be especially attractive to
