The channelisation thesis: correct, and worth defending with conviction
The regulated industry’s case for market liberalisation has always rested on a precise and verifiable foundation: betting markets exist independent of their legal status, and regulation is the only mechanism that can impose consumer protections, integrity monitoring, and enforceable accountability on those markets. Prohibition has never eliminated demand. It has only relocated it to environments where none of those safeguards can function.
This is not ideology. It is an empirically grounded position supported by every major market transition of the past two decades. Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Brazil, and Ontario all demonstrate the same pattern: channelisation into licensed frameworks increases suspicious transaction reporting, improves AML compliance, reduces the market share of unlicensed operators, and enables mandatory responsible gambling interventions. These outcomes are not conjectural. They are documented consequences of regulatory architecture.
That distinction matters because the industry’s credibility on channelisation is not unconditional. It is credible insofar as the industry demonstrates genuine commitment to the harm reduction principles that underpin it. When the argument is deployed selectively — to protect revenue lines while deflecting scrutiny of products that cause measurable damage — it loses its footing. And when the industry’s opponents can point to evidence of real harm that operators are choosing not to address, the channelisation thesis becomes harder to defend in legislative chambers and regulatory consultations.
The purpose of this piece is not to weaken that thesis. It is to argue that the industry’s best chance of defending it long-term lies in acting, now, to address the specific product categories that are giving its critics the most useful ammunition.
The unscrutinised amplification layer: social media
Any honest account of athlete harassment in the context of sports betting must begin with a fact that has received insufficient attention: the primary infrastructure through which betting-motivated abuse reaches athletes is not the licensed sportsbook. It is social media.
Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook are the platforms on which bettors with losing tickets translate their frustration into targeted, searchable, persistent abuse directed at named individuals. The mechanisms are well understood: bettors can locate athlete profiles in seconds; posts can include names, statistics, and wager amounts that leave no ambiguity about motivation; and the platforms’ engagement-optimised algorithms have, in many documented cases, amplified rather than suppressed this content.
The social media companies have not been required to answer for this. They are not licensed by gambling regulators. They face no condition of licence that requires them to moderate betting-motivated harassment. They collect advertising revenue from gambling operators while providing the communication infrastructure through which operator customers abuse the athletes whose performance those operators have monetised. This arrangement has attracted remarkably little regulatory attention.
This is not an argument that the regulated industry bears no responsibility. It does. But the industry’s responsibility exists within a broader ecosystem of accountability that the current public and regulatory discourse has not yet properly mapped. The regulated operator who profits from a prop bet on a college athlete is one actor in a chain that also includes the platform that hosts the subsequent abuse unchallenged and the algorithmic curation that distributes it. The political and reputational pressure has fallen almost exclusively on the first actor while the others have operated without constraint.
The regulated industry should state this plainly and lobby for it to change. Calls for minimum moderation standards on betting-motivated harassment — mandated across social platforms by gambling regulators as a condition of advertising permissions — are both proportionate and overdue. This is a position the industry can hold without conceding anything on channelisation. It is also a position that improves the broader harm reduction environment in which the industry operates.
What the evidence on athlete welfare actually shows
The regulated industry cannot dismiss the evidence of harm that has emerged from research on athlete welfare. The NCAA’s 2025 quantitative surveys — covering over 20,000 student-athletes across 493 institutions — documented that 46% of Division I men’s basketball athletes received negative or threatening messages traceable to betting outcomes. Over a quarter reported verbal or physical incidents. These are not marginal or disputed figures.
Among professional athletes, the evidence base is thinner but consistent in direction. An anonymous multi-league survey found 78% of MLB players reported that betting market expansion had materially changed fan behaviour toward them. A European comparative study published in 2025 found professional footballers exhibited problem gambling rates approximately three times those of the general population — a separate but related indicator of the intensity of athletes’ relationship with wagering markets.
The specific product at issue is the player proposition market: a bet structured not around the outcome of a competition but around an individual’s performance. Whether a named player records more or fewer rushing yards, passing completions, or three-point attempts than a set threshold. The granularity of these markets creates a direct and visible line between a bettor’s financial outcome and a named individual’s physical performance. That is a qualitatively different exposure than a match result bet, and it is the product category most directly implicated in the documented harassment data.
The industry’s response to this evidence should not be dismissal. The research has been produced by credible institutions using robust sample sizes and peer-reviewed methodology. Engaging with it honestly — and distinguishing where the evidence is strong from where it is weaker — is a more durable position than denial.
The reputational context the industry cannot afford to ignore
Sports betting is not an industry that enters this debate from a position of public trust. In most regulated markets, polling data consistently shows that large pluralities of the general public view gambling expansion with ambivalence or concern. Reputational surveys of major sportsbook brands regularly record lower trust scores than other consumer finance categories. In several jurisdictions, politicians who campaign on tightening gambling regulation face no meaningful electoral cost from doing so.
This is the context in which the athlete welfare debate is playing out. And it is the context in which the industry’s response will be read. When operators argue against restrictions on player prop betting without making substantive distinctions between college and professional athletes, without acknowledging the evidence that exists, and without putting forward credible voluntary frameworks, that argument is not interpreted by legislators or by the public as the channelisation thesis. It is interpreted as a revenue protection exercise.
The calculus here is not simply ethical. It is strategic. The 18 US states that have already enacted restrictions on college athlete prop betting did not do so in a vacuum. They did so in response to evidence, to advocacy, and to the absence of credible industry alternatives. Where the industry has not offered workable self-regulatory frameworks, legislators have filled the gap — and in several cases the resulting restrictions have been broader than the specific harm data would have required. That pattern does not reverse itself unless the industry changes its posture.
The question for operators and their leadership is not whether restrictions on some form of prop betting are coming. In several jurisdictions, they are already here. The question is whether the industry shapes those restrictions through proactive, credible engagement, or whether it resists them until a more acute crisis forces a response that it has no role in designing.
The case for pragmatic self-regulation, and why it is stronger than the alternative
The sustainable industry position is not to defend every revenue line regardless of evidence. It is to identify where the channelisation argument holds — where regulated availability produces better outcomes than its unlicensed alternative — and where it does not. That distinction, applied honestly, leads to a defensible position.
Player proposition betting on college and amateur athletes does not pass that test on current evidence. These are individuals without professional union representation, without institutional legal support, without the financial buffers that allow professional athletes to manage reputational exposure, and in many cases without the psychological infrastructure to process targeted public blame. The regulated market is not protecting them. In this product category, for this population, it is enabling the harm.
That is not an argument for prohibiting prop betting across the board. Professional athletes operate within collective bargaining frameworks. Their unions — the MLBPA, NFLPA, NBPA, and European equivalents — have the institutional capacity to engage with regulators and operators on the governance conditions under which performance markets should function. The harassment problem for professional athletes is real, but it is addressable through platform conduct frameworks, operator-level enforcement, and fan behaviour codes. That is a meaningfully different situation.
Voluntary withdrawal from college athlete prop markets — or active, visible support for the regulatory interventions that multiple state legislatures have already enacted — would represent a credible and evidence-grounded act of self-regulation. It would also narrow the legislative surface area that prohibitionist advocates can work with. Every time the industry concedes, on its own terms and in advance of a crisis, a product category that cannot be coherently defended, it becomes harder to sustain a broader prohibition argument. Every time it resists the obvious, it provides those arguments with new material.
This is not a novel concept. Pharmaceutical companies withdraw products from specific patient populations where harm is disproportionate while defending availability for populations where the benefit-risk calculation differs. Food and beverage companies reformulate products in response to nutritional evidence before mandatory reformulation is legislated. The pattern is consistent: industries that act ahead of the evidence curve retain more control over the outcome than those that wait for crisis to force their hand.
What this requires from industry leadership
None of what is described above will happen as a natural consequence of market incentives. Player prop betting on college athletes is profitable. The data sets that would allow operators to quantify the reputational and regulatory risk of defending it indefinitely are not fully assembled. And shareholders, whose time horizons are typically shorter than the legislative cycles through which gambling regulation moves, will not volunteer for revenue reduction.
This is precisely why the argument being made here is addressed to CEOs and their boards, not to markets. The decision to lead on self-regulation in this area is not one that market dynamics will produce spontaneously. It is a leadership decision that requires understanding the long-term competitive environment in which this industry will operate and making a case to shareholders that short-term revenue protection at the cost of reputational and regulatory exposure is not, in fact, a conservative strategy.
The regulated gambling industry has produced, in several markets, genuinely sophisticated regulatory engagement. The integrity monitoring frameworks built around IBIA membership, the UKGC’s conduct frameworks, the responsible gambling levy architecture in the UK — these are products of industry leadership that understood its long-term interest in the integrity of the regulatory compact. The same logic applies here.
Industry leadership on college athlete prop betting should include active public support for the regulatory bans already passed in 18 states; voluntary policy adoption in markets where those bans are not yet in place; commissioning of independent, large-scale professional athlete surveys that fill the current evidentiary gap; and formal engagement with player unions on governance frameworks for professional performance markets. This programme of action would constitute a material demonstration that the industry’s channelisation argument is grounded in genuine harm reduction commitment rather than revenue protection framing.
Conclusion: a rallying call for the industry that wants to survive intact
The channelisation argument is correct. Regulated markets demonstrably outperform their unregulated alternatives across consumer protection, integrity monitoring, AML compliance, and problem gambling intervention. This is the case the industry should make, consistently, precisely, and with confidence.
But it should be made by an industry that is seen to mean it. And right now, in the specific domain of athlete welfare, the industry is not seen to mean it. The evidence of harm in college athlete markets has been produced by credible institutions and has gone, in most jurisdictions, without a credible industry response. The social media companies that amplify this harm have operated without accountability. And the regulatory interventions that have filled the vacuum have been designed without meaningful industry input.
The regulated industry has a choice. It can continue to defend every product category regardless of evidence, treating each restriction as a precedent to be resisted and each piece of harm data as an adversarial instrument rather than actionable information. Or it can lead — on college athlete markets, on social media accountability, on professional athlete governance — and use that leadership to strengthen its position on the broader and more defensible case for liberalisation.
The first path is commercially legible and strategically myopic. It prioritises the current quarter over the next decade of market access. The second path requires CEOs who are willing to make arguments to their boards that short-term margin is not the relevant variable — and who understand that the industry’s continued existence in its current form depends on its willingness to govern itself where the evidence demands it.
That is the choice in front of the regulated industry’s leadership. It is not a comfortable one. But it is the correct one, and it is available now.