Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport

by Darragh McGee

A pioneering investigation into the new digital age of gambling, its explosive growth and the transformational impact it is having on sport, fandom and society.

A cheeky flutter. All part of the game. Get closer to the action. A friendly, familiar voice, inviting you to join the real fans and get involved. What harm could it do…

It has never been easier to stake a bet. Wall to wall adverts have hijacked every sporting event – the mobile slot machine in your pocket all you need to enter an immersive world in which gambling is faceless and frictionless, available 24/7, on almost any aspect of any sport.

Since its origins as a provincial cottage industry almost twenty-five years ago, online gambling has become a globe-straddling behemoth worth more than £10 billion a year. It can sometimes feel as if the point of sport is to bet on it.

How did we get here? How did a new wave of gambling brands hijack sport on a global scale?In Imitation Games, Darragh McGee travels the world to tell the incredible story of the digital brands who unleashed this new world of gambling onto a new generation of fans (and got very rich doing so).

At the same time, he traces the harm and human cost that gambling leaves behind; and shows how we can create a different future for sport and society. Because when the fun stops, it stops hard.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports

405 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 28, 2026

Reviews

[Judy]

Mandatory reading for every sports fan.

I've been sick and tired of all the gambling ads plastered over every moment of sports broadcasting for the past few years. I lived in Canada while sports gambling was legalized, so I directly experienced the massive and immediate change to the style and atmosphere of sports coverage. I've never been tempted to place a bet and I still don't know what over/under means, and I'm not planning to find out. But did you know sports betting is so much worse than you could've imagined!!!

Really interesting tracing of the roots of sports betting, its intersection with gambling and how it all blew up with football becoming the global giant it is over the past 30-40 years, and how we're still escalating year after year after year even though we know there's harm for both gamblers and athletes (who regularly report receiving death threats from people whose bet didn't turn out), and nobody's winning except the house.

[Jose Camacho]

I’ve known about sports betting and have done some in the past, and am kind of grateful for knowing I was able to restrain myself from doing anymore after finishing this book. It gave me a clearer understanding on why gambling is a such a big issue to sport and us who enjoy it, and if just makes me feel ashamed to support some of those teams that are sponsored by them. And even knowing that they got rid of the sponsors on English kits, it still never addresses the root issue since gambling is still allowed to happen on the sport. Knowing how its affected sport, Ivan Toney to the recent connections in the NBA, it just leaves a very sour taste in your mouth knowing the integrity of sport can be drained away by the sheer fact that betting is allowed. It feels like every other month there’s a new story of how a player gets caught or even recently with Harper, encouraging addicts to continue gambling by personally messaging them. I hate what it has done and even with the few steps that have been taken to help minimize its impact on addicts, it won’t be enough til there’s a full on ban. I’ll continue to watch sports, it’s just a shame that you are bombarded with messages to gamble responsibly.

[Noora]

Devoured this book in a single day. I found the topic fascinating, especially the origins of sports gambling moving only very recently from horses to football and from there, everywhere. The takeover has been swift and to me, someone who would consider themselves a sports fan even though I've never been into horses or football specifically, very jarringly sudden. I suppose the writing was on the wall though. The book is definitely an academic work, but there is a humanity in it that I'm thankful for. Having listened on audio, I was also charmed by the author-narrator's accent, it made the more academic text much more interesting to listen to.

[Rob Sedgwick]

Imitation Games sets out to explain how gambling became so embedded in modern sport, football especially, and it does so by taking the reader from the old world of betting shops - frosted glass, fixed-odds coupons, cash on the counter - to the present landscape of smartphone apps, pitch-side ads and shirts plastered with logos you’d struggle to even use in the UK. It's a familiar story if you've lived through it.

For me, a lot of this was a trip through my own past. I've always bet a lot, but rarely in the way the book's problem gamblers do. I started with coupons, moved online, built models, hunted edges. I wasn’t chasing the buzz; I was largely searching for mispriced odds. That didn't make me popular with many of the "villains" the book picks out from the industry - several limited or closed my accounts even when I wasn't winning much, simply because I was picking off the best prices. In the end I more or less stopped once the Gambling Commission insisted on UK-based operations and the sharper firms exited the market. That left mainly odds designed for people who don’t understand betting.

And that’s the group the book focuses on: the punters drawn to the worst-value bets imaginable. Scorecasts, first goalscorer, correct score, corners, bet builders, cash-out - all the markets built around excitement rather than fairness. You can't win on them in the long run, no matter how great your sporting knowledge. They are good fun for most recreational gamblers, but a terrible investment for the problem gamblers. I'd forgotten Sky Bet’s old slogan, "It matters more when there’s money on it," which I embraced at the time. Watching matches between two teams you don't support is a lot better when there's money on it; you don't have to be a problem gambler to know that.

The final section of the book tries to look forward, but as the author admits, there aren’t many easy answers. You can ban shirt sponsorship or rein in advertising, and it might help a bit, but football is global now, and many of the brands splashed across Premier League kits are aimed at Asian punters anyway. Technology moves faster than legislation, and the industry moves faster than both. So the book ends up being less a roadmap out of the mess and more a history of how we got here - a problem that feels too big, too embedded, and too profitable to unwind neatly.

[Bill]

Brilliant book, very readable. In part the story of the expansion of getting businesses into football in the UK and the tech revolution of internet and smartphone gambling leading to the innovation of in match betting, plus a look at the social consequences in the UK and then the expansion of the UK's innovations to other parts of the world. Big teams such as Manchester United and City now have global betting partnerships with big betting firms so that these firms can build upon the global fan base of these hugely popular clubs. It's hard not to see the deregulation of gambling by the Labour government as an unleashing of misery and hardship on working class men in the UK, that is now being exported to other hard pressed communities. A wake up call, but the success of reducing smoking in the UK shows that such self destructive behaviours can be moderated and limited if there is a political will to do it.

[Cindy.Sherban]

Thought there would be more on stas of gamblining addiction in this book. Well researched. The hijacking of regulation should be of concern to everyone whether as it relates to gambling, or many other aspectsof regulation in the public interest. SAd reflection of the ills of thee 1% trampling folk down. Another casualty of living in the age of distraction

[Mairead]

Scary

[Zguba Salemenska]

Informative but very much an academic work as 200 pages of footnotes might suggest.

[Erika]

This is like taking AP Euro before learning modern US history (of sports betting). Eye opening and important.

[Jack Currie]

A look into how gambling companies have exploited the system and prayed on some of the most vulnerable members of society. This book showcases the techniques that have made sports gambling, particularly in football a force to be reckoned with.

It outlines how self-regulation will achieve nothing and only if we as a population take a stand, will proper change be made to prevent these firms growing in influence.