‘Betting with mates’: Gambling apps,masculinities and the financialisation of everyday life

Abstract

The emergence of new digital technologies makes gambling more accessible than ever before. Whilst problem gambling is known to be a gendered issue predominantly impacting men, how young men use and understand gambling apps is not well understood. Most gambling research is conducted from a psychological perspective that does not account for gambling as a social practice, or the digital aspects as part of broader processes of financialisation and ‘everyday’ forms of indebtedness. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with young men in the Hunter region of Australia, we explore the role of ‘bet with mates’ features on gambling apps in the social lives of young men, especially in relation to their participation in sport. In this article we seek to break with approaches that have focused primarily on problem gambling to instead consider the role of gambling in young men’s everyday lives and socialities, which are described by participants as offering opportunities for banter, connection, and friendship. The affordances of digital technologies extend the capacity for gambling and betting beyond traditional spaces such as the betting parlour, racetrack or casino into more intimate spaces through the continuous and ever-present smartphone. We pay attention to how gambling apps are used as part of mundane social and digital practices for young men during the course of their everyday lives – both alone and with friends. We show how betting apps are entangled with the particular socialities of young men’s lives, embedded in hetero-masculine norms associated with sporting and drinking cultures in Australia.

Introduction

Most research on gambling focusses on problem gambling in the medical and psychological sciences, and tends to ignore or minimise the role of pleasure and fun (Nicoll, 2019). Studies of gambling have become synonymous with studies of addiction, with research on gambling concentrated in the psy-disciplines which pathologise and individualise problems related to the practice (Nicoll, 2019). This is an empirical problem in a social context in which gambling is increasingly integrated in everyday life and sporting spaces. As Reith and Dobbie (2011: 483) contend, ‘gambling is a fundamentally social behaviour that is embedded in specific environmental and cultural settings’. At a broad population level most gambling harm is related to low risk or moderate gambling (Russell et al., 2019), belying the primary focus on problem gamblers in existing research. The majority of research into gambling also fails to recognise how the availability of gambling products is concentrated in, and indeed actively targets, the lowest socio-economic areas, and how this may shape patterns of gambling engagement and harms (Nicoll, 2019).

Importantly, in recent years mobile digital technology has spread increasingly gambling to environments beyond the pub and casino (Reith 2018; Torres and Goggin 2014). The ubiquity or ‘everydayness’ of gambling practices in this context presents a particular set of issues which require new, or expanded, understandings of gambling beyond addiction and harm towards more mundane and broader framings of leisure, as a set of social, financial and consumption practices. In this article we take up these issues, focusing on the role of ‘bet with mates’ features on gambling apps in young men’s social lives and considering how this relates to their participation in sport. Drawing on the findings of interviews conducted with young men who use these features we ultimately argue that these apps are entangled with the particular socialities of young men’s lives and the affordances of digital technologies.

Sports betting and gamblification

Sports betting is one of the fastest growing forms of gambling worldwide (Lopez-Gonzalez et al., 2020). Young men form the primary demographic engaging with sports betting, with those who have not completed university education more likely to practice sports gambling (Seal et al., 2022). As in our study, others have found that within friendship groups, there is a common view that betting on sports is perceived as normal, harmless and central to the enjoyment of the consumption of sport (Etuk et al., 2022; Rayman and Smith 2020; Seal et al., 2022). One study, conducted in Australia, found that 75% of children and 90% of adults thought that betting was becoming a ‘normal’ aspect of sports (Pitt et al., 2016).

Generally, sports betting marketing invokes the community feel of sport, drawing on the rituals and traditions, language, and sense of togetherness that sporting participation and spectatorship provides. Research shows that sports gamblers are highly aware of these aspects of sports betting marketing (Gordon and Champan 2014). Problem gamblers have been shown to be most exposed to the effects of gambling marketing because they have greater exposure to, and a more favourable disposition towards them (Hing et al., 2015). Further, Hing and colleagues (2017) have highlighted that the marketing of sports betting extends far beyond advertisements. Specifically, they identified 15 different types of inducements offered by sports and race gambling platforms, stating:

All inducements were subject to numerous terms and conditions which were complex, difficult to find, and obscured by legalistic language. Playthrough conditions of bonus bets were particularly difficult to interpret and failed basic requirements for informed choice. Website advertisements for inducements were prominently promoted but few contained a responsible gambling message. (Hing et al., 2017: 687)

In Australia, up to half of sports bets are impulse bets. That is, made on the spur of the moment through unreflective decision making, which increases the chances of negative consequences of gambling practices (Hing et al., 2018).

As already identified, new technologies have led to the development of online forms of gambling such as sports betting, which are available perpetually in everyday environments through one’s smartphone (Deans et al., 2016; Hing et al., 2023; Nyemcsok et al., 2022). The integration of gambling cultures and activities into non-gambling activities such as sport has been described as ‘gamblification’ (Macey and Hamari, 2024). Delfabbro and King (2023: 1) argue that the dual processes of digital convergence and ‘gamblification’ have ‘blurred the boundaries between social media, gaming and gambling, and the rise of gambling and gaming ecosystems’. As a result, gambling is now culturally embedded in sport through marketing imagery and language that seek to evoke emotional connections between the two activities.

The digital convergence of gambling and sports-betting also means that there are relatively new structural features (live betting, cash out, micro-event betting and instant depositing) which are available 24/7, increasing access to the extent that rapid and continuous gambling activity is now possible anywhere (Parke and Parke 2019). These digital features are also increasingly gamified, with smartphone sports betting features encouraging a frictionless user experience (Ash et al., 2018) and seeking to evoke ‘comfortable’ feelings that downplay the risks of gambling and indebtedness. As we have shown in other work, the gamification of finance seeks to tap into the perceived tastes and preferences of young consumers, fostering forms of financial subjectivity by harnessing the ‘playful nature’ attributed to Millennials (Threadgold et al., 2025). Further, since gamification processes are specifically aimed at intensifying fun and pleasure, enjoyment should be a central lens for understanding how gambling is experienced in everyday life.

At the same time, however, there are particular concerns associated with sports betting’s normalisation of gambling as part of the wider financialisation of everyday life (Rayman and Smith 2020). We explore gambling practices in this study as part of this wider array financialised practices and sensibilities that infuse ‘the everyday’ (see (Anderson et al., 2020), creating a context in which the lines between calculation and more free-flowing and instinctive acts of gambling as a form of socialised yet financialised form of consumption are blurred. For this reason, consumer studies provides an important perspective for understanding the contemporary significance of gambling and the implications of digital convergence in gamblification (Brock and Johnson 2021). Whilst it is important to acknowledge the severe harms associated with problem gambling, in this article we seek to break with approaches that have focused primarily on problem gambling to instead consider the role of gambling in young men’s everyday lives and socialities, which are described by participants as offering opportunities for connection, friendship, and banter. Specifically, we focus on how gambling apps – and particularly bet with mates features – monetise previously non-financialised aspects of sports practices and consumption, creating a context in which mateship and fandom become financialised practices that align with the wider development of rentier capitalism (Christophers, 2020).

Gambling and masculinities

Sports gambling is broadly associated with expectations of normative masculinity (Nicoll, 2019; Hing et al., 2023; Goedecke 2021). Traditionally, sports and horse gambling, and betting spaces more generally (other than the likes of bingo), have been identified as spaces in which particular hegemonic masculinities are performed and rewarded (Cassidy 2014). Men themselves tend to define gambling as a ‘masculine’ activity (Cassidy 2014: 170) involving an ‘analytic persona, one in which masculine fandom meant dispassionate calculations and risk management’ (Tussey 2023: 364; see also Simonsen 2012; Venne et al., 2020). Cassidy (2014) describes betting shops as spaces where men share gambling knowledge between themselves and where hegemonic masculinity is valued (see also Lamont and Hing 2020). Sports bars have been subject to similar analysis, with Pennay et al. (2021) identifying two kinds of spaces: typical venues that televise sports to draw in young men who bet less often but bet in larger amounts, and more specified spaces that have a sports bar section to attract older men who bet more often but in lesser amounts.

In Australia, gambling is integrated within most major sporting events through sponsorship and advertising, and is tied closely to representations and expectations of masculinity (Nicoll, 2019 p.126). Like the beer advertisements with which they often alternate in live sporting broadcasts, the majority of gambling advertisements are variations on the simple theme that ‘boys will be boys’ (Nicoll, 2019 p.126), – emphasising risk, daring, and an overt ‘action movie’ aesthetic. They also clearly align with and reinforce heterosexual and binary gender relations, particularly through disavowal and distance from anything associated with ‘the feminine’, and reinforce self-reliance alongside the masculine socialities of all-male friendship groups, characterised by ‘banter’, light-hearted ‘ribbing’, and having a laugh. By associating and encouraging gambling as central to these social relations, men’s friendships are associated with processes of monetisation.

Marketing and promotion of sports gambling have been found to be particularly prominent in Australia (Etuk et al., 2022). In such promotions hegemonic masculine figures are still key, but more recently layers of satire, irony and playfulness with gender roles have been used to appeal to a wider array of consumers, resulting in advertisements in which ‘meanings around “softness” are ambiguous, ironic, and serve to normalize gambling by distancing it from discourses about addiction’ (Goedecke 2021: 802, see also Goedecke 2023; Kroon 2022; Kairouz et al., 2023; Svensson et al., 2011). Tussey (2023) puts forward the figure of the ‘benign degenerate’ that aligns male sports fandom and gambling with wider interactive TV practices of transactional participation where ‘this new sports gambling persona challenges previous depictions of sports gambling that have categorized this behavior as a form of financialized citizenship’ (Tussey 2023: 363).

In Australia, Lamont and Hing (2019, 2020) identify several interrelated factors when it comes to masculinity in their interviews with white, heterosexual Australian men aged 18–34. Firstly, sports gambling was seen as a male practice, where younger men were influenced by older men in their various peer groups, which is also evident in our data. Sports betting in this regard becomes a space for masculine identity construction to play out, where ‘sports betting success produced cultural capital and subsequent social status by virtue of analytic skill, risk taking and boisterous, competitive social interactions’ (Lamont and Hing 2019: 245). Some have argued that this gender identity-based orientation to sports betting ‘attaches fragile social and cultural capital to the allure of the gambling win [and] encourages the chasing of losses and impulsive betting’ (Rayman and Smith 2020: 381).

Nyemcsok et al. (2022)'s qualitative study with 18–24 year-old men about their understandings of the risks and contexts of sports bettingfound that tperceptions of risk were informed by the role of early experiences, including exposure to gambling advertising in sport, and the gambling behaviours of social networks; peer rivalry and competition, in which sports betting was used to form connections within and across peer groups; the normalisation of gambling. Other studies in Australia have shown how risk and shame must be navigated in new ways as gambling practices now extend into domestic and intimate spaces through smartphone betting apps (Irving, 2025; Irving et al., 2024).

Methods and participants

This article presents findings drawn from qualitative study of young men’s use of sports betting apps as a social or group activity which included 12 participants who identified as men, were aged 23–30, and lived in the Hunter region, Australia. Participants were recruited into the study through sporting clubs in the Newcastle area, where Threadgold has long-standing ties. Men within these clubs who were known to engage in sports betting as a social activity were contacted directly via email or text message and invited to participate in the study. This targeted purposive approach was adopted following a previous study of financial practices, in which recruiting young men proved challenging (see Coffey et al., 2024). The specificity of the cohort of study is one of the reasons for the small sample size. Small sample sizes such as those in this study can be judged as adequate for ‘certain kinds of homogenous or case sampling’ (Sandelowski 1995: p. 179) where theoretical saturation can occur with smaller numbers of participants, as was the case for this study. The participants received a $50 gift-card in acknowledgement of their time and contribution to the study.

The participants who took part in the study almost all grew up in Newcastle, with only one moving to the area more recently. All of them were white, heterosexual cis men, and almost all of them had partners. Most of the participants had completed or completing Bachelor’s degrees, although one had completed Year 11 while another had completed a Master’s degree. All of them were employed, working in areas including accounting, plant operations, physiotherapy, teaching and hospitality work. Most participants were in fulltime, permanent positions, meaning that their income was relatively stable.

The participants took part in semi-structured interviews to explore their experiences using ‘group based’ sports gambling apps. This project addressed two research questions: (1) How are ‘group based’ sports betting apps used and understood by young men? (2) How do these ‘new’ digitised, gamified products link with the broader terrain of financialised practices? Interviews were conducted by Curtis, as he most closely matched the demographic profile of the participants and was intended to assist participants to feel more comfortable in the interview (Pini and Pease 2013). Interviews lasted approximately 1 h and were primarily conducted face-to-face over the course of 2023. The interviews included demographic questions, followed by discussion of participants’ employment situation and money practices (including their current income, investments and debts, their other sources of financial support, sources of credit that they accessed, whether their finances were shared with a partner, whether they felt that they were good with money, and where they accessed financial information and advice). The discussion then moved on to gambling, focusing first on their practices and experiences, and then on their opinions on gambling. Finally, the discussion focused on the participants’ use of bet with mates apps and other forms of social sports betting. This study received ethics approval from the University of Newcastle Human Research Ethics Committee.

The data were analysed by all members of the research team, using a method adapted from Deterding and Waters, (2021) ‘flexible coding’. This approach involved coding thematically to allow for comparison between interviews, and then coding analytically in order to place our findings in dialogue with existing empirical and conceptual material. The data presented in this article represent four of the primary themes that emerged during analysis: (1) the broader settings of sports, betting and masculinities, (2) bonding and belonging through betting, (3) betting with mates through mobile apps and gambling socialities, and (4) extending the potential for gambling socialities into everyday life. The findings are organised around these themes, and the quotes presented below were chosen to exemplify themes that were reflected throughout the interviews.

Masculinities, sports and betting cultures

Participants described gambling and betting activities as a ubiquitous part of their social sport environments. They described the availability of gambling in the broader Australian masculine culture provided through venues such as sports clubs and pubs, meant that gambling and masculinities often seemed to them to be synonymous. As John (25) puts it, betting is a part of everyday life where ‘blokes’ are just ‘doing blokey things’:

I’d say the vast majority of young blokes around where I live definitely do bet … if you sort of looked at it generally, I mean yeah, it’s groups of blokes doing like blokey things. Usually they're the ones punting, and the ads are like blokes doing blokey things like drinking and watching sport or just taking the piss out of each other. Just like, about yeah golf and like how bad I am at putting or whatever. Like all that sort of stuff.

Mateship, friendly rivalry, and sporting knowledge are central ways that masculinities are connected with, and performed, through the socialities of gambling for young men (Hing et al., 2023). David (29) similarly discusses how being with ‘mates’ normalises betting on horses in particular in his friendship group from the cricket club:

I think in terms of like mates and how that affects you, I think it’s more just normalising it. I’m from a cricket club that is a classic club of boys and everybody is betting on horses. We are in a punters’ club; we are all watching the horses on a Saturday while we are waiting to bat. You are back to the footy club, that’s our sponsor, everyone has a few beers, everyone goes into the pokie room and puts in money. I think that’s more like the mateship group and how that affects it.

Masculine-dominated social circles, in David’s example centring on the cricket club, provided an environment where betting felt like a completely natural part of the sporting ecosystem, combining the physical spaces of sports organisations and clubhouses which play an instrumental role in the gamblification of sport and derive revenues from wagering operators, and masculine socialities, where men come together in these spaces to bond and enjoy being with their friends and teammates. In this way, gambling broadly is understood by participants to be a normalised practice for young men related to sport and friendship.

Participants contrasted these social sports club gambling settings with other pub settings where there are gambling opportunities, for instance via poker machines. Jeff (23) reflected that the degree to which he felt compelled to use the pokies depended on whether or not he was with his mates:

Like, I go and have dinner at a pub or something [with partner or family] and I’m not really worried about going for a bet or putting money through the pokies that sort of thing. But other times, you know, it’s a bit different: like sometimes when you’re with your mates it’s hard to stay away though when, say, two or three blokes are wanting to put some money in [the poker machines] and see what they can pull out.

Here, the socialities of being with his mates create an environment where ‘it’s hard to stay away’. Participants are clearly aware of the gendered dynamics of gambling culture as part of their ‘guy’s group’ and ‘normal’ men’s leisure activities and behaviour. For instance, Tim (23) stated:

Yeah, it’s probably just what I’m sort of used to. Mostly guys school group, and then work is probably a little bit more guy-orientated, and then obviously cricket is all blokes… I think part of it is probably just I think we generally follow sports a little bit more than some women do. In general, probably. But then I guess maybe it’s just a little bit sort of… I don’t know, common, or part of the culture of guys’ groups, probably, now.

Moreover, as Greg (28) points out, doxic gendered group dynamics makes the association of gambling, sports and mateship feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy that one is just pulled along with:

Probably just growing up with mates that I’ve grown up with, and the type of mates. We all probably pointed each other in the direction of who we all… Yeah, we all sort of like footy, and like watching the horses and stuff, and we all just sort of get around each other with that. We just sort of all keep going in that direction, I guess.

Our participants therefore illustrate the close connections between the social gatherings of their sports club, mateship both through the club and through existing shared spaces (such as school), and masculine forms of bonding facilitated by sports betting practices, which we now expand on.

Bonding and belonging through betting

Participants describe being inducted into gambling practices through their connections to other men in their sports club. As David (29) explains, these practices are normalised, and for young men who are keen to display their masculinities they present an opportunity to connect with older men:

I think if you were to just sit outside, you’d probably feel like you were missing out on a bit of that. And you’ve also got 18-year-olds that are thinking that $20 to put in the pokies is a lot of money. And then you’ve got 40-year-olds on full time wages who are just going like whatever, they will be $250 in, $5 hits. I remember myself when I was 18 in the Leagues Club going up, there was this bunch of three guys and they’d always play $5 hits religiously, they’d smash them. They were all earning good money, I don’t think they were necessarily gambling addicts but they’d player high level bets. And you’d see that, and they’d come back with $800 wins.

Part of the allure of these spaces was the opportunity to connect with other men in situations where masculine emotionality is allowable to a certain extent in the context of winning and losing. The highs and lows of these experiences, and the emotionality connected to them, are seen by many participants as being crucial elements in forming deeper relationships with other men, with David (29) stating:

So I think being part of that group changes men, especially, just like that bonding thing with men, bonding over losing and winning money and stuff like that.

Indeed, these types of experiences represent an opportunity for the type of masculine relationship building that is seen as appropriate in context in which hegemonic forms of masculinity are valued. David (29) highlights that these experiences allow men to perceive deeper connections between men that gamble when compared to those who are part of the sports club but do not bet:

I guess I was always, I think you get drawn to those kinds of people as well in your life. You want to hang out with someone who takes risks, is reckless, is happy to throw $100 in with you, perhaps a big win, gets you drunk, get a cab into the nightclub. Like they are the kind of people I’ve always been a little more friends with than the guy who comes back after cricket and has premixed drinks, a chicken schnitzel and says, “all right, I will see you at training”. Yeah, I’ve probably never been as close to those guys, really.

In forming these bonds, participants suggest that they feel some assumed responsibility to support each other and keep their gambling practices in check, with a tacit recognition that these practices can be damaging and risky. Whilst it is clear that the bonds formed between these men create the space for difficult conversations about gambling harm to take place, the need to do so perhaps arises from a discomfort about their own practices and how that might be reflected in the behaviours and emotionality that is born through their mates’ gambling practices. As Jeff (23) put it:

It’s probably not the comfortablest topic to talk about you know, but I think you’ve got to do it, especially keeping an eye out for your mates, that’s probably the main thing you’ve got to be doing, so you’ve got to keep an eye on them when they can get a bit carried away especially after a few drinks and that sort of thing it can get out of hand placing bigger bets and that sort of thing, so it makes it hard. (Jeff, 23)

While the participants did not generally view their own gambling practices as problematic they were, at times, critical of the availability and normalisation of sports betting, with David (29) identifying the sheer volume of horse races in Australia at any given time as ‘ridiculous’:

That’s why Australia has so many horse races, it’s ridiculous. There’s probably one on right now, there’s probably, the TAB – oh I can’t look, I don’t have an account. Today’s racing, you know, Gunnedah, Ballarat and Cairns are all racing today, like what the fuck? It’s July on a Tuesday morning, it’s mental.

In the above exchange David pulls out his phone to consult his app and show the interviewer a number of current races, but finds he does not currently have an account. However, he is familiar enough with the schedule to know the typical racing locations on any given day. The ubiquity of horse races available to bet on is matched, and extended by, the new possibilities of mobile sports betting through apps.

Betting with mates through mobile betting apps

As outlined above, the participants were recruited from sporting clubs, and were therefore connected to peers by playing sport. Betting provided an extension to this existing common ground for the participants. Gambling through sports betting apps was often discussed by participants as inseparable from the broader landscape of betting activities already embedded in their ‘sporting’ lives (such as the TAB or pokies in sporting clubs and pubs). However, the mobile capabilities of sports betting apps are different in that they can extend the possibility for gambling anywhere, anytime– settings such as watching sport alone or with mates at the pub or socialising after sport.

Sports betting became a particularly important social lubricant during COVID lockdowns when they could not be together physically to play sport and socialise. Some participants describe using ‘Bet with Mates’ during COVID lockdowns in place of meeting and gambling with friends at venues such as pubs.

It probably started around COVID in 2020 when you couldn’t really do much so you ended up betting a bit because there was not much on to do or anything really… especially when you’re all at home locked up with not much to do, no sport on or anything, so it’s the only thing that really kept going during COVID… we’d sort of just message about it or we’d usually have a Zoom once a week on a Friday or a Saturday depending what everyone was up to and we’d get on and have a bet that way and that way we can see what everyone’s betting on and have a bit of a laugh and a bit of a joke. (Jeff, 23)

Gambling apps providing a focal point for social interactions and connections at a time when there were no physical opportunities for catch-ups centred on sport. Will (26) described how conversations about betting could provide an ice-breaker to begin the social interaction, with gambling providing a ‘common purpose’:

I think it’s that common purpose like you’re talking about the races and you’ll go off on a tangent about something else and then you’ll ask whatever has happened that week. Yeah, it’s like a starting point and then everything goes from there. (Will, 26)

Discussions about ‘the races’ thus became a way into talking about the broader events of the participants’ day to day lives. Tom (25) similarly describes how social interactions with particular mates centre around gambling, including ‘incidentally’ when they are at the pub having a drink, and through screenshotting a bet on his phone and inviting his friend to join in via a betting app:

We usually only do it when it’s like us two at the pub just having a drink, we’ll just do it that way, but that one time when we did win it was because we had the bonus bet that was going to run out so we were just like chuck something on and we’ll see how we go, and then, yeah, we ended up winning, so yeah. I might send him a photo of like a bet that I’m thinking and then just be like “Oh yeah, what do you reckon?” or whatever, and then if he’s like “Yeah, do it”, it’ll go in the Bet with-Mates, but other than that it’s normally just me.

Tom’s example demonstrates how smartphone affordances extend the physical environments of betting to be even more ubiquitous, allowing peer groups to consult each other and connect over betting even when they’re not in the same room. Byron also describes different settings where he will bet (alone at home, or with friends at the pub). Crucially, the betting apps on his phone make it possible for him to place a bet on the ‘spur of the moment’:

Byron: If I’m at home watching the footy I might have a look at the odds just going “Oh, who’s going to win?” or whatever, and then if I see something then I might put a couple of dollars or something on that, like a couple of try scorers or something, but it’s sort of like spur of the moment, it’s not like, yeah, I’ve got to put my $10 on or whatever it is this week and that sort of thing … or the other one’s probably like if I’m down at the pub with mates or whatever and we’re just sitting there and watching a game or watching a few horses or dogs or whatever, like I’ll have a bet.

Facilitator: And when you’re at the pub like in that situation, do you do it through the TAB or do you use the app on your phone?

Byron: It depends, like I’ve got the TAB app on my phone and I’ve got Sportsbet as well, so it’ll just depend on like what I’ve got. Sometimes it depends on the money in the account, like if I’ve got money in my Sportsbet I’ll just do that, or if I’ve got money in my wallet I’ll go up to the TAB and do it that way. But yeah, like it’s just sort of, again, spur of the moment, just how I’m feeling at that point in time…

For Byron, gambling through digital betting apps is normative and mundane both in social settings and when he is alone on the couch depending on his ‘feelings at a point in time’. This example also shows how betting apps extend the potential for gambling anywhere and at any time on the ‘spur of the moment’, and how gambling apps mean that betting is always available in any setting. In these examples, broader processes of masculinities and financialisation are particularly relevant for understanding the contemporary significance of gambling as a digital social practice for young men in this study.

Discussion

In this study, the broader environments of sporting clubs and masculine gambling cultures were central for understanding young men’s use of sports betting apps. The social and gendered landscapes of gambling are crucial in the social lives of these young men, especially in relation to their participation in sport. Participants described gambling as an inextricable part of their ‘boys’ sport club’, as a group of ‘blokes doing blokey things’: playing sport together, socialising afterwards at the pub or clubhouse, and catching up ‘as mates’ beyond the sporting field. Participants described how the normalisation of gambling in their social sporting networks, and the availability of gambling in the broader Australian masculine sporting and drinking culture provided through venues such as sports clubs and pubs, meant that gambling, masculinities and friendship often seemed to them to be synonymous. Participants describe gambling as providing a way to belong with other men, particularly for bonding in the sporting environments of their broader friendship networks. These settings also provide opportunities for displays of emotionality in the context of winning and losing that are not typically otherwise permissible. Gambling through sports betting apps provided a way of extending these social interactions and betting opportunities both within, and beyond, their physical interactions in the sports club or pub. Betting apps provided an opportunity to connect, which became particularly important during COVID. Similarly, conversations about betting were an ice-breaker at the beginning of social interactions, with gambling providing a ‘common purpose’ and leading to an opportunity to talk about other events or issues in their daily lives. In this way, sports betting apps are firmly located within the broader gambling cultures of young men’s lives, yet also extend the reach and ubiquity of betting. Betting apps extend the potential for gambling anywhere and anytime through their continuous availability (Nyemcsok et al., 2022; Parke and Parke 2019; Irving et al. 2024). Gamified features of sports-betting apps seek to evoke ‘comfortable’ feelings (Ash et al., 2018). Set alongside the mens’ descriptions of bonding, conviviality and affinities formed through betting together and apart, feelings of comfort are likely intensified. Such feelings are deliberately cultivated through gamified gambling app design to downplay a sense of risk associated with gambling debt.

These findings align with a range of other studies which show that sports betting is now a normalised, socialised and firmly embedded lifestyle feature for young men (Rayman and Smith 2020; Lamont and Hing 2019, 2020). As in other studies, betting identities in our study were produced through a context which combines sports fandom, masculinity and drinking culture, and with a consumer culture that promotes instant gratification, youthful identity and hedonism (Rayman and Smith 2020). Cassidy (2014) also found ‘men’s betting shops’ in the UK served a similar purpose for creating an opportunity for hegemonically-masculine social relationships to be developed and ‘shored up’. Gambling is usually researched in the language of ‘lifestyle risks’ which would ‘harm’ financial, personal, and relationship wellbeing (Hing et al. p.789). Yet the normalisation of sports betting within masculinities suggests its ‘everydayness’ needs to be taken seriously and understood, rather than pathologized or thought of solely through the lens of risk. We suggest the use and significance of betting apps is more usefully understood as extending the cultural dynamics of masculinity, sports and gambling, than only via understandings of ‘problem gambling’ or even gambling as an isolated leisure practice.

Like Nicoll (2019) and Waitt et al. (2022), we argue that paying attention to emotions and leisure, that is, the everyday socialities of gambling practices is important to move beyond oversimplified biological and psychological accounts that focus on risk, but do not address the convivial and joyful aspects of gambling. As our examples show, the masculine socialities of team-based sporting environments infuse gambling practices with a sense of camaraderie and connection. In some examples, gambling through betting apps is a main feature of mens’ relationships, as a conversation starter. Using a lens of enjoyment is particularly relevant since gambling has increasingly become a government supported form of everyday consumption, what Young (2010) has described as the ‘state-sanctioned commodification of chance’. Gambling research creates powerful social realities about what gambling is (Nicoll, 2019), and we should pay attention to the developments which have produced what gambling ‘is’ today, and the everyday practices which connect to contemporary understandings of gambling (Nicoll, 2019). These examples support Nicoll (2019) suggestion that the affective lens of ‘enjoyment’ should be taken seriously as a way of understanding the pleasures and ambivalences which are a part of everyday practices of gambling, particularly given the relative normalisation of gambling as a part of everyday life for young men in particular. This is especially the case with ‘the liberalization and deregulation of the industry and the simultaneous expectation that individual players govern themselves [which] express the tensions inherent in consumer capitalism’ (Reith 2007: 33). Similar to Cassidy’s (2014) findings, we contend that gambling through mobile sports-betting apps can be understood as a practice through which hegemonic masculinities are maintained and created in a way that is more available and accessible than ever before as part of the broader landscape of the financialisation of everyday life (Langley 2014; Martin 2002), where aspects of male friendship undergo a form of monetisation.

We view gambling apps and the embedding of gambling into sports cultures as particular exemplars of financialisation, where the financialisation of daily life refers to the increasing influence of financial markets and financial institutions on everyday life, including personal finance, consumption, and social relations. This also connects to what Langley (2008) has argued is a new form of subjectivity demanded by processes of financialisation that combines the capacity to make calculations through the knowledge of credit technologies with moralised self-responsibility in the face of the risk that accumulating debt involves. Sports gambling apps are part of this financialised landscape. Young men’s digital sports gambling practices are occurring through ‘everyday space-times’ (Anderson et al., 2020) as they go about their lives; in social leisure settings like the pub with mates, alone on the couch at home, and during the day at work and the range of other ordinary scenes and situations where sports betting is perpetually digitally available and accessible through a smartphone. Whilst the convergence between other financialised practices including use of cryptocurrencies has been explored in research by Delfabbro and King (2023), analyses which explore the gendered aspects and associations of these practices are less common. Tussey (2023) examines the gendered (masculine) associations with mobile gambling as a gendered cultural practice aligning with financialised thinking. Tussey (2023, p.367) creates a distinction between social gambling in the ‘everyday’ and more calculative, ‘serious’ forms of ‘financialized thinking’ in a setting such as fantasy gaming. Perhaps this distinction is more tied to the different environments, settings and contexts of various forms of gambling, rather than differing degrees of ‘financialization’. We would argue that through the broader processes of the financialisation of everyday life, this does not always entail ‘cold eyed’ calculation and competition (Tussey, 2023); rather, a wider array financialized practices and sensibilities infuse ‘the everyday’ (see (Anderson et al., 2020) where the lines between calculation and more free-flowing and instinctive acts of gambling as a form of socialised but financialised form of consumption are blurred.

Conclusion

In this article we have aimed to show how sports gambling apps containing ‘Bet with Mates’ features are entangled with the particular socialities of young men’s lives, embedded in hetero-masculine norms associated in Australia with sporting and drinking cultures, and intertwined with the affordances of digital technologies which extend the capacity for gambling and betting beyond traditional spaces such as the betting parlour, race track or casino into more intimate spaces through the continuous and ever-present smartphone. We have done this by focusing not on problem gambling, but on the experience of gambling as an everyday practice that is interwoven into young men’s socialities as a normalised aspect of their engagement with sporting cultures. Conceptually this article draws together young men’s gambling practices with the broader financialisation of everyday life, highlighting how such practices build an existing social process through which subjectivities that are inclined to engage in the calculation and competition encountered in gambling are cultivated. In so doing we advocate for further research that considers gambling not solely as a source of potential harms, but as part of wider processes of financialisation in which previously non-financialised aspects of sports practices, friendship and consumption are monetised. Further research is also needed to explore the affective and sensate dimensions in how gamified financial products such as gambling apps are experienced by users, since gamification processes are specifically designed to enhance ‘fun’ and enjoyment and encourage increased use (Nicoll, 2019). Combining insights from the fields of consumer studies and sociology provides a way forward for understanding the significance of and gender and masculinities in digital gambling apps as a central practice of consumption for young men, with implications for understanding the contemporary dynamics of financialisation and economic inequalities.