The sports gambling craze in the uk started after I managed to almost entirely exclude adverts from my life -- the main adverts I see are on the escalators on the tube and tend to be for shows. Even then I try to avoid the tube and walk instead.
I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.
When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.
We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way
Aha. I'm also in California. This explains why the ads stand out more to me when watching the (baseball) World Series and listening to podcasts -- because generally, gambling sites don't waste their time and money advertising to me.
I wouldn't be that opposed to an 'everything goes' style sports division. Not only would it be fun to watch, but it would partially solve the issue of trans people in sports (which as a trans person I'm passionate about)
I see where you are coming from. Some of that stuff is known to be very harmful, though. Plus from a practical point of view, you'd have to basically repeal a lot of substance laws, not just change sports rules.
Legalized sports betting has broken the deal! Now we get the worst of both worlds.