Dr Darragh McGee’s new book, Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport, examines the increasingly close relationship between sport and gambling, and what this means for fans. In this edited excerpt, he explores the psychology of sports fandom, including how emotional investment and perceived expertise can shape betting behaviour.
You only need to listen to radio phone-ins, dedicated fan TV or an old-school debate in your local pub to know that some sports fans go as far as to think they know better than the experts – be it a pundit, performance analyst, coach or tactician.
And yet, painful though it is to hear, sports fans rank among the least objective of any human group when it comes to rationally predicting the outcomes of events in which they have an inherent and often deep emotional investment. And that’s saying something given that, as a broad-brush generalisation, humans are irrational creatures whose perception of reality is clouded by cognitive bias at every turn.
Like it or not, we are emotional beings liable to lapses in concentration, errors of judgement and distortions of memory. What’s worse, technology often amplifies this fallibility. As Jamie Bartlett, author of The People vs Tech, cautions, the internet is an emotional medium which not only accelerates how we access information but may be changing the way we think – making us even less rational and more impulsive.
Sports fans may be more susceptible to all of this than most. Part of this is because fandom is often irrational, raw, even tribal. Millions of us form deep affinities at a young age and go our entire lives supporting a particular team or idolising athletes whose names are chanted, and achievements celebrated, with a reverence otherwise shown only to war heroes and deities. It’s much more than a game, as the saying goes, because the psychology of fandom, even the success of our team, is intimately bound up with self-identity, even self-esteem, as well as community pride and belonging.
The trouble is that gambling firms know this – and have done for a long time. In their consumer modelling, there’s no such thing as an unbiased sports fan free of nostalgia, superstition and blind hope. Any effort to objectively predict the outcome of a particular fixture is, then, forever in danger of being sabotaged by our mind’s eye, which happens to be looking through rose-tinted spectacles.
Because of this, most bets we stake are passion plays undermined by a range of primitive psychological flaws, the first of which is our ego. According to the ‘male hubris effect’, young men are particularly susceptible to the idea that they are using their intelligence to get ahead. Sports gambling indulges this ego trip by promoting the idea that we bet based on skill and knowledge rather than pure chance.
Dr Steve Sharman, Reader in Psychology at Loughborough University, is an experimental psychologist who also happens to be a lifelong football fan – a Derby County supporter – who enjoys a casual bet. He freely admits feeling many of the phenomena he studies impacting on his own behaviour. He explains why it’s an alluring trap that many fall into: “We all know theoretically that playing the lottery or a game like roulette is based on chance. But when we bet on football, there is so much information that we can consume and study, including the form of the home and away teams, as well as that of the key players, etc. Fans also have a sense of intuition about their team and make judgements based on their own perceived knowledge of the sport, the fixture, the players.”
It’s easy to see how sports betting is sold as a ‘no-brainer’ extension of all this – a monetising of knowledge you already possess. It even plays on the same competitive spirit of sport, imploring you to ‘put your money where your mouth is’ by pitting your wits against other fans or the gambling firms. For those who are already fatefully invested in the drama of live sport, all of this can be seductively sold as a ‘natural’ raising of the stakes, taking your fandom to the next level.
For many of us, this is a short-lived experiment that peters out after a few humbling early bets that fail to deliver the affirmation we sought. But for those who experience the feel-good factor of a winning bet early on, the dopamine hit is laced with an affirmation of ego that is a powerful reinforcer of behaviour. This is psychologically significant because it taps into the masculine undercurrents of fandom, establishing a positive behavioural association that also feeds into the competitive posturing of a wider fan culture or lifestyle where ‘bragging rights’ matter. This distinctly masculine bravado means that losing bets, and losing streaks, often remain undisclosed or selectively erased from memory.
“The skill acquisition theory of all this is really interesting,” explains Sharman, “because when you apply a set of cognitive processes to betting on sport and it goes your way, it is a powerful reinforcer of behaviour. It feeds into an illusion that you’re in control.” This illusion of control is a psychological trap that Sharman considers to be particularly effective in turning sports fans into keen gamblers. What’s more, he explains, is that it’s not even contingent on winning. Even when you narrowly lose a bet where your sporting knowledge was a key factor, it’s easy to believe that you’re getting better or closer to your ultimate goal.
That makes sports fans more likely than most gamblers to reflect on their rational choices selected from a wider pool of bets that we intuitively considered staking, deluding us into applying the logic of a learning curve to our betting record such that even losses are absorbed as part of the pursuit of mastery.
This extract was edited for the SSA website by Holly Wood-Blake. From Imitation Games: How Gambling Highjacked Sport, first published in 2026 in the UK by The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage and part of the Penguin Random House group of companies. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House Limited. Copyright © Darragh McGee 2026.
Dr Darragh McGee is an academic based at the University of Bath and an authority on the changing relationship between gambling and sport. He has led a decade of cutting-edge research on the growth of online sports gambling in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa, including the public health impacts on a new generation of young people. His research and writing appear in global media outlets, including The Guardian, the BBC, and Men’s Health. He holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, Canada. He was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2020. Imitation Games is his first book.
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