This Sunday, the Brisbane Broncos will take on the Melbourne Storm in the NRL grand final. Coming a week after the Brisbane Lions’ victory in the AFL grand final, it marks the culmination of another winter of Australian sport. While most Australians will tune in for the spectacle of the games themselves, others will have money riding on the results – a fact that is drawing increasing scrutiny from policymakers and the wider public.
A pressing question is how gambling behaviour responds to these marquee events. Grand finals are more than just matches. They are high-salience cultural rituals where gambling is heavily promoted, widely normalised, and more socially accepted. With gambling advertising saturating broadcasts and bookmakers rolling out special offers, these periods raise particular concern for those vulnerable to gambling problems.
Despite this, surprisingly little is known about how major sporting events shape gambling activity. Generally, academics, policymakers and interest groups rely on survey data, which lacks the granularity to explore how gambling changes and responds over time. To fill this gap, we turn to consented, deidentified and aggregated transaction data that allows us to observe gambling spending at a detailed level.
We find that sports gambling participation does spike around major sporting events. These spikes vary geographically, with the State of Origin driving larger increases in New South Wales and Queensland, and the AFL Grand Final generating a stronger response in Victoria. Beyond these peaks, there also appears to be a broader increase in participation during the AFL and NRL seasons, with betting activity lower at other times, such as during the cricket season. It is not clear if these differences are due to seasonality, differences in audiences, or cricket’s relatively weaker association with gambling advertising.
But what drives these spikes? Decomposing participation by amounts that are gambled reveals that the spikes around these sporting events are mainly driven by increases in small betting activity (less than $100). In contrast, gambling at higher levels ($500 or more) remains relatively stable throughout the year. To the extent that smaller bets are associated with more casual, less problematic gambling, this suggests that the increase in participation around these events may overstate their impact on gambling-related harm.
Nonetheless, whether increases in gambling around major sporting events are harmful remains unclear. Specifically, there are three caveats to the points above.
First, the Melbourne Cup is a large outlier compared to other sporting events. Despite concerns about the growing integration of betting into the football codes, the Melbourne Cup – Australia’s oldest cultural fixture for gambling – remains the single largest driver of betting activity. It stands out not only for the sharp spike in participation, but also for the increase in the share of relatively large bets. Even the median regular better spends $50 more during Melbourne Cup week than they do in the period around it. This response is much larger than for events such as the AFL Grand Final or the State of Origin.
This has implications for policymakers. While much of the public discourse focusses on the rise of online betting and its spread through popular sports, it is still the ‘legacy’ forms of gambling that account for much of the behaviour that could be most closely associated with harm. Consistent with this, poker machines remain the form of gambling most strongly linked to problem gambling.
Second, the long-run effects of greater participation around these events are unclear. The integration of gambling into sporting culture could serve to normalise it, acting as a gateway to more problematic long-term gambling behaviour. We cannot rule out that the casual short-run response observed may translate into more harmful consequences in the long-run.
Finally, the data only captures online sports wagering. To the extent that people respond to sporting events by gambling more with cash, we may be understating the total response. For events such as the AFL Grand Final or State of Origin this seems a minor concern, however for the Melbourne Cup there may be significant cash-based gambling occurring that we are not observing.
So, what does this tell us?
The most obvious takeaway is that there needs to be stronger evidence on consumer behaviour in the gambling market to guide effective policy. At present, policymakers know little about how consumers respond in real time to sporting events, gambling advertising, changes to gambling salience or policy interventions. There is also a lack of evidence on how short run effects translate into long run outcomes.
Access to transaction data or other granular forms of data is a first step, revealing insights that may challenge public discourse. Future e61 work will examine how policy interventions shape gambling behaviour, and what the key drivers, solutions, and trade-offs are in efforts to reduce harm.
Aditya Maitra
Aditya is a Pre-Doctorate Economist at the e61 Institute. He recently graduated from the University of Melbourne with degrees in Commerce (Honours in Economics) and Mathematics. His honours thesis investigated outcomes in Australia's rural petrol markets, exploring the extent to which they are driven by imperfect competition between firms. Moving forward, he interested in how granular data can be used to examine and address meaningful policy questions.
Matt Maltman
Matthew Maltman is a Senior Research Economist at the e61 institute. He previously worked at the Australian Productivity Commission, where he focused on various policy issues including education, public transport, and housing policy. He is passionate about housing affordability and writes on the impact of housing supply reforms globally. Matt holds a degree in Economics from the University of Western Australia, where he graduated with First Class Honours.
