I've been thinking about Connor McDavid a lot lately. Not his hockey — though obviously that's absurd — but about what it meant when he signed with BetMGM back in 2022. He was 25. Still playing. Still someone you could bet on that same night. And he just... did it.
The NHL had already put a team in Vegas by then, so maybe the writing was on the wall. But watching the best player in hockey become a sportsbook pitchman felt like watching someone cross a line that I didn't even realize existed until it was gone.
The Money Changed Everything
Here's what happened: Americans wagered almost $150 billion legally in 2024. The gambling sponsorship ecosystem across the Americas hit $1 billion that same year. Those numbers are so big they stop meaning anything, so let me put it differently — the UFC's deal with DraftKings alone is worth $70 million annually. One deal. One sport.
When that kind of money shows up, people's principles get flexible. I'm not being cynical, just honest.
Charlie Blackmon actually beat McDavid to it by about a month, signing with MaximBet. Baseball's collective bargaining agreement had opened that door — players could do marketing deals with gambling companies as long as they didn't bet on the sport themselves. Seemed reasonable at the time. Now it seems quaint.
LeBron signing with DraftKings in January 2024 was different. McDavid is famous in hockey circles; LeBron is famous everywhere. 150 million Instagram followers. The deal focused on football picks, not basketball, which was clever legal navigation but also kind of beside the point. DraftKings didn't pay him whatever obscene amount they paid him for his NFL insights. They paid him because he's LeBron.
What Bothers Me (And What Doesn't)
I should be clear: I don't think these athletes are doing anything wrong. The leagues themselves take money from sportsbooks. Team owners have equity stakes in betting companies. The NFL fought sports betting legalization for years, spent millions on lawyers, lost at the Supreme Court in 2018 — and now they play the Super Bowl in Vegas and act like they invented the concept.
So when someone tells me it's unseemly for famous sportsmen to promote betting platforms like odd96, I want to ask them where they think the league's broadcast money comes from. Those commercial breaks aren't filled with public service announcements.
What does bother me is the speed of it all. Pete Rose is still banned from the Hall of Fame for betting on baseball. That was the third rail for my entire life. Now Olivia Dunne — a college gymnast turned influencer who's never played professional sports — is shooting Fanatics Sportsbook commercials in a bathtub at the Rose Bowl. The ad is genuinely bizarre. They put a clawfoot tub on the 50-yard line and had her promote FanCash rewards while surrounded by bubbles.
I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's weird, and I think we should acknowledge that it's weird.
The New Playbook
The athlete deals have gotten increasingly creative, sometimes in ways that feel almost desperate to stand out. Dale Earnhardt Jr. signed with Hard Rock Bet this year and they're giving him a slot machine game. "Full Throttle with Dale Earnhardt Jr." His race car gains speed with each win. The man is NASCAR royalty, won the Daytona 500 twice, got inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2022 — and now he's a casino game.
Earnhardt seems genuinely into it — he talked about loving music and how Hard Rock "has something for everyone." That's the thing about the partnerships that work. They don't feel forced. Derek Jeter doing responsible gaming spots for BetMGM makes a weird kind of sense because integrity was always his brand anyway. Kevin Garnett and Jamie Foxx have been doing this stuff for years and it just seems like part of their post-career portfolio.
The Olivia Dunne deal is interesting for different reasons. Fanatics is trying to reach people who don't watch traditional sports betting commercials. She's got a massive social media following, she's 22, she represents a demographic that grew up thinking gambling was normal entertainment. The campaign is called "Explained by Livvy Dunne" and it's explicitly designed to stand out from the usual sportsbook ads with guys in suits talking about odds. The director did Kendrick Lamar's halftime show, which tells you something about the production budget.
The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Across all five major leagues, new gambling partnerships averaged $6.1 million last year — almost double what renewal deals got. The sportsbooks are paying more for fresh faces than they are to keep the ones they have. That tells you something about how competitive customer acquisition has become.
Some industry analyst noted that signing a rising young player for $300K annually becomes a bargain when they hit stardom and would command $2 million. The sportsbooks are talent-scouting now, essentially. Looking for future stars the same way teams do.
The financial upside for athletes is real. For someone like McDavid, the BetMGM deal added to an already impressive portfolio — Adidas, Rogers Communications, CCM equipment. For college athletes in the NIL era, these deals can be life-changing money. Dunne reportedly became the highest-paid female college athlete before she even graduated. Now she's doing national sportsbook campaigns.
Meanwhile, Ontario banned gambling ads featuring athletes in 2024. The Premier League's pulling betting logos off jerseys starting in 2026. Belgium and the Netherlands have heavy restrictions. Italy and Spain have outright bans on sports betting marketing.
America keeps accelerating in the opposite direction. And honestly, I get both sides. The harm reduction crowd has legitimate concerns about normalization and addiction. The free market crowd points out that adults can make their own choices and regulated betting is safer than the alternative. Neither side is entirely wrong, which is what makes this exhausting to think about.
Where This Leaves Us
The U.S. sports betting industry generated $13.7 billion in revenue last year. California and Texas still don't have legal betting, and the industry wants those markets badly. When they eventually open up — and they will, because the tax revenue is too attractive — expect another wave of athlete partnerships and stadium naming rights and all the rest of it.
The athletes taking these deals aren't stupid. They know some people find it distasteful. They know the optics are complicated when you're promoting a sportsbook and people can bet on your performance that weekend. They're doing it anyway because the money is significant and the stigma has faded enough that it won't hurt their legacy. Maybe that's cynical. Maybe it's just realistic.
That's the real story, honestly. Not that gambling and sports have merged — that was always going to happen once the Supreme Court opened the door. The story is how quickly we all got comfortable with it. Five years ago this would have been a scandal. Now it's just business.
Connor McDavid is still playing. Still the best in the world. And I don't think anyone under 30 even remembers that his BetMGM deal was supposed to be controversial.