Imitation Games

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. 'As the number of gambling related suicides, bankruptcies and family break-ups mount we at last have a book that explains how we let this happen, what the real costs of the industry are, and what sport might do about it' David Goldblatt, author of The Age of Football and The Game of our Lives 'McGee takes readers on a gripping journey through the dark machinery of modern sports betting—from punts and push notifications to data tracking, debt, and addiction, revealing how an industry built on predation has weaponized technology to exploit human vulnerability' Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas