I don’t see how betting on sports is any worse than buying lotto tickets or making risky options or shitcoin trades that the person barely understands.
Sports betting also has the unique issue of introducing corruption into sports. A league like the NFL has a huge number of players, coaches, referees, and league staff, all of whom can influence the outcome of a game, and all of whom are potentially susceptible to bribes. A notable case of this happening is the "Black Sox" scandal, where the 1919 Chicago White Sox blatantly threw the World Series in exchange for bribes from a gambling syndicate. The more prolific sports betting is, the more likely events like this are.
This cannot be overstated.
I like to watch my local hockey team. To (legally) access their games, you must pay $30/mo (or have a cable TV package that includes it). Once you pay the entry fee, you're then to subject to _near constant_ ads for gambling: at least one gambling ad every commercial break (and which translates to ~10 ads just during periods), betting lines and bookmaker logos in scorebugs, full-screen takeover ads with reads during breaks in play, ads for on-network shows covering gambling more in depth, etc.
Oh, and at one point the team had a sportsbook _inside the arena_ (it's since been replaced with a different sponsor).
It's completely taken over sports broadcasts.
Sports betting is not zero harm, but the rate of harm is significantly lower than the kinds of betting that are legal in parts of the US.
The US is one of the weirdest markets globally in that it legalized all the high-harm activities (because of massive political corruption) and banned all the low-harm stuff. Now they are normalizing, you have the hysterical people who don't really understand why it was banned initially saying that Eden has fallen.