Last week Stewart Kenny told the Irish Independent he would be horrified if his grandchildren opened a betting account. Kenny co-founded Paddy Power in 1988 and ran it for 14 years. He was not worried about the bet itself. He was worried about what comes after it. Sports betting, he said, has become a Trojan Horse. It gets people through the door, and the casino is waiting inside. Most of the industry will shrug at that. It deserves a proper answer.
It would be easy to paint Kenny as a man who turned on the industry that made him. That is not who he is. He still bets. He still calls gambling part of the entertainment mix. He left the Paddy Power Betfair board in 2016 because, as he tells it, the board would not act on the concerns he kept raising. Since then he has retrained as a psychotherapist and co-founded Stop Gambling Harm with Fintan Drury and Ian Armitage. He has taken his case to the Treasury Committee at Westminster and to Ireland's Finance Minister. He goes further on casino than this piece does, and that difference comes later. The narrow version of his argument is the one worth having.
A bet on sport is one product. An online slot is another. They work differently, they do different amounts of harm and people play them for different reasons. For twenty years the industry has sold them as one thing, and used the first to recruit for the second. A bet is either connected to the sport or it is a gateway to something else. Brazil has just shown what the gateway costs.
Three tests for any bet
Kenny has a simple test for how addictive a product is. How long is it between the stake and the result? Are near misses built into the game? How quickly can you go again? Put any betting product through those three questions and the industry splits in two.
A bet on a race or a match, the way most fans place it, scores low on all three. The result comes when the sport delivers it. The near misses, a horse beaten a short head or a shot that hits the post, come from the sport and not from a designer. Once the bet settles there is nothing to do until the next fixture. And the bet only makes sense if you understand the game, follow it as it happens and care who wins. That is a bet connected to the sport. Fans have placed it for as long as there has been sport to watch.
A spin on an online slot scores high on all three. The result is instant. The near miss is built into the reels. The next spin is seconds away. There is no sport underneath it, so there is nothing to understand and nobody to support. When Paddy Power opened its first shops, the betting day was a race every half hour. Now there is something to bet on every second.
The harm data points the same way. The Gambling Commission's survey for Great Britain scores players for problem gambling. Among people who played online slots, the share scoring 8 or more was nearly six times the average. Among online casino players it was about five times. For online sports betting it was about twice. A Swedish population study found that problem gambling and heavy debt clustered around online casino play, on its own or combined with live sports betting, and not around sports betting alone. None of this proves cause. But it all points one way.
The line is not simply sport on one side and casino on the other. Sports betting has a fast end of its own. A market on the next point, refreshed every few seconds, is a long way from the match. One Australian study found problem gambling among 78% of people betting on in-play micro events, against 29% of other sports bettors. None of that makes in-play betting the problem. Done well, it is the most involving way to follow a match. The point is to build it around the moments that matter in the game, not around the clock. The test is the connection to the sport. Speed is how that connection breaks.
This is not an argument against casino
Casino is a legitimate product. Millions of adults choose it with their eyes open. It is licensed, regulated and heavily taxed. The businesses that run it well deserve the same respect as any other. Nobody should be lectured for choosing it, and nothing here calls for a ban.
Countries draw the line in different places. Australia allows licensed online sports betting and bans online casino. Britain allows both and taxes them differently. Online casino has paid 40% since April. Remote sports betting will pay 25% from next April, with racing kept lower. Belgium allows both but keeps them on separate websites with separate accounts. Ireland was asked to match the British casino rate before this month's budget and chose not to.
Wherever a country draws its line, the industry should respect it rather than blur it. The blurring is the gateway. It is not an accident.
The gateway, in the industry's own numbers
Everyone inside the industry knows how it works. Someone, often very young, opens an account to back Manchester United for the title. Within a day the free spins for the casino arrive. Kenny described it to MPs last year as a barman who serves you a shandy and then offers a triple brandy on the house. The customer has been moved "from the least addictive product to the most addictive product". Nobody asked him.
The industry does not hide this. It reports it to investors. In 2022 FanDuel told shareholders that in the American states where it offered both products, 41% of new sportsbook customers were playing casino games within a month. Its results for the last quarter of 2024 credited new slot content and promotions tied to professional sports with helping its casino growth. DraftKings' chief executive has said that cross-selling from the sportsbook is still the most effective way it finds new casino players. Rush Street Interactive says a customer who uses both products is worth 2.4 times one who uses one. In Britain, NatCen found bookmakers won an average of £602 a year from accounts used for both betting and gaming. From betting-only accounts they won £135.
The logic is simple. A sports bet is the cheapest and most respectable way to win a customer. The casino is where the margin is. So the sports bet becomes the front door to a room the customer never asked to enter. Theo Bertram of the Social Market Foundation told the same committee that remote gaming in Britain grew 84% between 2016 and 2024. A good share of that growth came in through the sports bet.
Why the gateway threatens sports betting itself
Brazil is the clearest warning, and the previous piece in this series covers it in detail. Brazil legalised fixed-odds sports betting in 2018. By the time the regulated market opened in January 2025, the licences covered online casino too. Casino went on to produce most of the regulated revenue, around 60% by industry estimates. The product that came to stand for the whole problem was not a football bet. It was a slot, Fortune Tiger, known to every Brazilian as Tigrinho.
When the ban came, it made no distinction. The government made its case on household debt and health. The timing was political, nine days before an election. The measure still has to pass Congress, and the operators are going to court. But polls put public support for a ban at around 75%. Every licensed site went dark on 6 October. Fourteen of the twenty clubs in Série A had bookmakers as their main sponsors, and between them they stand to lose deals worth close to R$1 billion a year. Sports betting was caught in a backlash against online gambling as a whole. Nothing in the market had ever set it apart.
The same pattern plays out wherever the gateway operates. It hurts sports betting in three ways.
- The harm carries the sport's name. Nobody outside the industry separates the casino tab from the match bet. The losses happen in the slot lobby and the headlines say "betting". Sport then pays for it, through sponsorship bans, advertising limits and public suspicion of the bet on the match.
- Public tolerance comes as one package. People accept a sports bet because they see it as part of being a fan. Use that bet to feed a product the public has turned against, and the tolerance goes too. Brazil did not just ban casino. It banned everything.
- The fan's trust. A supporter who backed his team on Saturday and finds himself in a slot lobby on Sunday did not choose that. He was promised a bit of fun with the sport he follows. Breaking that promise is the opposite of integrity, in the plain sense of the word.
Sports betting has one asset casino does not have: a seat inside sport, alongside its fans, its clubs and its broadcasters. That seat is worth more than any cross-sell. The gateway spends it.
In sports betting, integrity has always meant clean markets and no fixed matches. It should also mean a bet on sport that stays a bet on sport.
What keeping a sports bet a sports bet looks like
None of this means banning anything. It means separating two products that should never have been sold as one.
The bookmakers have two good answers. One account lets them see everything a customer does and step in. And adults should be free to choose both products. Both points are fair. Neither needs the funnel. A customer who wants the casino can walk in through a separate door. And a bookmaker that wants the whole picture should be arguing for data sharing across operators. That is where most of the picture lives. Keeping two products in one wallet does not give it to them.
- Consent, not default. Since May 2025, bookmakers in Great Britain have needed a clear opt-in before they can market casino to someone who signed up to bet. That should be the minimum everywhere, Ireland included.
- Separate accounts, separate wallets. Belgium requires sports betting and casino to sit on different websites, with different accounts and no transfers between them. Stop Gambling Harm has asked for the same. Bookmakers say split accounts make spending harder to monitor. They also remove the funnel.
- Design around the sport. A sports product should be built on what makes sport work: understanding the game, following it and caring who wins. Speed inside sports betting should be treated as a risk, not a growth lever.
- Sport should write it into its contracts. Leagues, clubs, broadcasters and racing bodies sell access to their fans. They can require that a fan who arrives through their brand is never marketed casino. Kenny and Matt Zarb-Cousin made that case to racing. Every sport should make it.
- Regulators should measure the gateway. The Gambling Commission publishes problem gambling rates by product. If it published cross-sell rates by bookmaker, everyone would see who runs a sportsbook and who runs a front door.
None of those measures touches an adult's right to play casino if that is what he wants. They stop him being moved there without choosing.
The bet the public will keep allowing
This industry can do well for a long time. But the version that lasts is the one that sells the bet on the sport people already watch, and does not use it as a door to something else. This is not nostalgia for the betting shop. It is the only version of sports betting that societies keep allowing.
Every sport, broadcaster and bookmaker that takes a fan's bet should be able to answer one question. A week later, is that bet still about the sport?
If the honest answer is that the sport was the way in and the casino is the business, then something valuable is being spent. That is the relationship with fans, clubs and broadcasters, the thing that makes sports betting worth anything in the first place. Brazil shows how fast that relationship can be withdrawn, and how much sport loses when it goes.
The industry has a choice. It can keep using the sports bet as the front door to something else. Or it can build a business around the sport that brought the fan in. Kenny can make the case from the outside. The work has to be done inside the industry. A bet on sport should stay a bet on sport.
Keith O'Loughlin is CEO of Funteron, which puts sports betting inside the brands fans already trust. The fan stays inside the sport, and Funteron runs no casino. He was CEO of OpenBet until its sale to Endeavor, completed in 2022, and chairs Christchurch Casino in New Zealand.