In Odds We Trust

God is dead, long live the multi

Three of my guy friends each have an unwavering allegiance to, and adoration for, a team sport that they have come to be associated with (cricket, football, and NRL respectively). As a part of this intense devotion, they place regular bets on their particular sporting obsessions.

The wagers are not reckless or radical, they are studied, data-informed (in one case, by way of a painstakingly plotted Excel sheet to log and determine technical match player stats), and ceremoniously placed.
Now I too have a deep love for at least two sporting traditions and am swayed by the same emotional devastations from losses and irrational buoyancy from victories. But never have I ever felt compelled to formalise my devotion with a bet.
I know there’s a whole class analysis that I’m about to gloss over here (lest we forget Marx’s opium of the masses and all that…), but stay with me. Because it’s not just something I’ve noticed amongst my friends, it’s prolific amongst the friends of my younger brother, and their friends too, where placing bets on sports is everyday practice for the young adult man. My friends themselves don’t really have excess wealth to throw around, and these bets are relatively small, $15 at the most. 

So why does the spiritual libido of the young adult man now present through sporting dedication? My guess is religion, or that gaping maw which the move away from formalised religious practice has left.¹

We (my friends and I) live in what our last census determined an ostensibly secular post-Christian country. Where religion exists, it is deemed a cultural blip, or something generally ‘ethnic’. For the European descendants, the cathedral is just an aesthetic, and confession is something you do hungover on a Sunday morning with your flatmates all splayed about in the room of whoever is worst-off.
But secularism has always been a fiction in our country. The impulse to worship doesn’t just evaporate simply because the pews are empty. It evolves and finds new altars.

In All Things Shining, Dreyfus and Kelly argue that modernity has not eradicated the sacred so much as dispersed it. We no longer have an overarching protective father, and are left grasping for single moments of passion, for that which ‘shines’, because the unified moral cosmos of ancient Gods or religious protection has shattered. But, we still long for transcendence, for the community that comes with it. So now, we find other things to turn into icons. 

While organised religion is not a central space in the majority of our country, the stadiums are full. Sunday morning liturgy hasn’t disappeared, it’s just been rescheduled and franchised. If one were looking for a contemporary example of what de Botton calls a ‘religion for atheists’, professional sport is the perfect example. Sport offers what secular modernity otherwise withholds, i.e., ritual, community, shared narrative, sacrifice, and redemption. There are still saints (golden age legends), martyrs (the essential player who never scores), and the heretics (the player who defects under the storm of a contract war). To take the analogy further, we even have hymns as chants and scarves as rosaries.

Durkheim (who I know is deterministic in his Eurocentric sociology, nevertheless) argued that religion is, at its root, society worshiping itself. This is painfully clear in the sporting arena where we witness collective exhilaration from its own history and mythologies, reminding people that they belong to something much larger and louder and more enduring than themselves.

So what does betting offer in this context? 

My boys insist that it’s not thoughtless or random, but it’s knowledge and passion driving these bets. The gesture, however, is older.
The tithe in practicing religious (particularly Catholic) experience is a material declaration of spiritual allegiance. You give not because you are certain, but because you belong, and to part with your hard earned, often very needed money is a straightforward (and much exploited) way to demonstrate devotion. 

In the context of sport, placing a bet is ostensibly paying your tithe. It converts spectatorship into commitment. You are not merely entertained, you are invested. The bet, therefore, is proof of faith in your team, trust in providence turned trust in variance. A small offering laid at the altar of the odds.

And yet, the spectacle itself (to borrow from Dubord)³ engulfs the ‘bettor’. He consumes the very drama that consumes him. The sporting ‘house’ is serene and structurally advantaged for devotion to flow upward and profit to accumulate exactly there. Religious institutions rarely remain untouched by money and/or power, so while sport in a capitalist society may style itself as the ‘everyman’ entertainment arena, the scale of emotional and financial devotion makes it behave much more like a corrupt church than a league. The religious metaphor here becomes particularly delicious in light of the recent FBI gambling investigations and indictment of the NBA for financial fraud at the end of 2025.⁴

The gendered dimension is also worth examining here. 

Depending on what bubbles you move in, the traditional scripts of masculinity have been somewhat fragmented. Sport knowledge, however, persists as reliable masculine currency. Knowing stats, draft picks, and head-to-head records are forms of cultural capital in the Bourdieusian sense, that Judith Butler would say is an active performance of gender ritual that can be turned into real usable nominal capital. 

I asked my flatmate why he bets at all. His answer was inline with my religious theorising, but also strongly with a neoliberal perspective of systems understanding. A successful wager, he explained, was evidence of mastery, proof that he truly understood the sport. Not that he merely enjoyed it, but knew it. Placing a bet in the first place confirmed that he had faith in his ability to study the stats, track the players, weigh injuries, form, coaching inclinations, and momentum, and thus assemble from this mosaic a level of insight inaccessible to the casual viewer. Winning a bet, thereafter, was not primarily about the money. The money was simply the visible certificate of comprehension. A landed bet demonstrated that his relationship to the sport was not passive but transcendent, that he ‘knew’ it down to its bones. It is difficult not to hear in this explanation an older and more familiar cultural aspiration, i.e., the desire not merely to observe a system, but to master it.

Betting, therefore, becomes a performance of mastery. A successful bet demonstrates loyalty and expertise, signalling that your relationship to the game is not merely emotional but elevated and intellectual. Plumwood and Haraway called this the ‘master subject’, i.e., the rational figure who imagines the world as a single territory for his control. Sports betting culture is built on the assumption that with enough statistics, bettors can outthink chaos and the irrationality of life. 

Ecological philosophers would understand that mastery is mistaking participation in a system for control over it. Chelsea Watego crucially complicates this Western neoliberal idea that expert knowledge equals legitimacy. Power is what determines what counts as knowledge in the first place, and successful bets showing familiarity with the game becomes a form of authority, performing competence in a domain where expertise is socially recognised and celebrated. 

The wager of these young men, then, might be an attempt to restore something modern life has misplaced, a sense of shared orientation. Ritual, belonging, and the feeling that one’s attention and loyalty are directed toward a common horizon are not trivial desires. In the rejection of organised religion we have allowed markets to step in as the default architects of collective life. The result is a peculiar arrangement in which the search for meaning is funnelled through betting slips and capitalistic kickbacks that reproduce the same hierarchies of profit and control. 

None of this makes the impulse itself foolish. If anything, it confirms how persistent the human longing for communal life is. But. While people are scrabbling for meaning in the systems that suck the life and money from us, the ‘house’ waits patiently to remind us that the gods of probability are just as cruel and capricious as our gods have always been. 

1. Note, now, the radical mushrooming of Christian Nationalism, Apocalypticism, and Evangelical Traditionalism that continues to consume, in particular, the ‘white’ Gen-Z man.  ↩︎
2. https://stadiumdb.com/news/2017/10/the_top_three_most_beautiful_football_stadiums_in_the_world ↩︎
3. Debord, G., & Knabb, K. (n.d.). (1983) Society of the Spectacle. Rebel Press. ↩︎
4. The FBI arrested more than 30 people including players and coaches over allegations involving insider betting tips, rigged poker games, and organised crime-connections. See the United States Attorney’s Office October 23, 2025 Press Release. ↩︎