Justin Jefferson of the Minnesota Vikings was the best pass receiver in the NFL in 2022. Last October, he fell in action with a hamstring injury. On November 21, while his convalescence continued, he clarified the X platform (which we wonder why it was renamed since everyone always adds “formerly Twitter” afterwards) : “ My health is wayyyy more important than you winning your fantasy games. » (translation: My health is much more important than your victories in fantasy football.)
We then learned that the injured man had to endure, on social networks, a lot of pressure from fans of pools athletes who had drafted him and were now complaining about losing points because of him.
Now, Jefferson may have a little tight hamstrings, but he has a good head on his shoulders. In a certain way, through these disconnected (or too connected?) fans, it was an entire playful and parasitic universe that had become omnipresent that he put back in its rightful place: in unreality.
Originally, a pool, it was a family or a group of friends or work colleagues who, on the eve of the series, had fun bringing together and comparing their predictions. There might have been a few dollars in the key. It has practically become an industry in itself. And that’s still nothing compared to the sprawling world of sports betting. Are there still those family clans where, in the hour before the start of the Super Bowl, we carelessly throw our loonie or polar bear into the common pot, with the sole rule and ambition of predicting the most correctly? possible result of the match? Like that, for the simple pleasure of it?
Simple pleasure: words that no longer have much meaning in professional sport.
Between 2018 and 2021, the number of online players tripled in Quebec. And even if there were quite a few virtual slot machines there, the explosion obviously did not spare sports competitions, bringing an instinct once described as “vice” to the socio-spectacular respectability of a lucrative business global like any other. We saw the result in spring 2021, when the new “ bookies » electronics arriving in this booming megamarket almost managed to spoil our ride from the CH to the final. Georges Saint-Pierre bleating “Bet99”, we couldn’t take it anymore.
A few months later, Canada legalized sports betting on single matches. The consumer glued to his screen was now free to bet the grocery store’s money on the twists and turns of an action taking place live before his eyes.
The sponsorship of the Alouettes this fall was certainly more discreet than the usual advertising hype, but our champions nonetheless displayed, during the regular season, a very readable Bet99 on the front of their jerseys.
This normalization of sports betting is taking on the appearance of an irresistible wave. Until 2017, the sulphurous reputation of Las Vegas seemed to keep major league sports franchises at bay. Six years later, the Stanley Cup landed in Celine Dion’s former stronghold, and it is there, in the city of sin, that the next Super Bowl will take place. All is in allas the saying goes.
The TSN network now includes, in its coverage of the famous Sunday and Monday football evenings, animated segments provided by the bookselling company FanDuel, where odds and odds are discussed. spread (gap) rather than gains on the ground and passes made. Athletes’ performances are analyzed according to their possible usefulness in the eyes of virtual team recruiters. fantasy football. Same thing at Montreal Journalwhose sports pages are now adorned with the regular contribution of a self-proclaimed “betting genius”.
As any good marketer knows, the best advertising is the one that isn’t advertising. The hosts of FanDuel are a good example of this, they who resemble real sports commentators like an ass hair resembles a beard hair. But what really becomes fascinating is to see one layer after another of abstraction and distancing from the “real deal”, the one which, at ground level, continues to oppose bodies and physical realities and which is to the babble of electronic fauna what discourse is to metadiscourse.
In a manner as unsporting as it is predictable, the advertisements with which these online betting sites bombard us show humans obsessed with their phones, an apparently positive model: the guy doesn’t even look at his children splashing around in the pool one meter away. of him as he drifts, leaning over his contraption and tense like a rope, on the lookout for a result. And in sports bars, we are now too busy pacing and betting on our cell phones to think of looking up at the action on the screen, or even cheering on a club that has become a simple pretext.
On the legal side of things, Loto-Québec hogs a good share of the pie for us. On the dark side, there are the Hells, the Rizzuto clan and their street allies, with their more attractive odds, their tax-free winnings and their usurious loans to help out and retain the customer. It would be for control of the “sports betting book” that the mafia has been killing each other in and around Montreal for some time. Shooting yourself for a book is interesting in itself. As a police source told Daniel Renaud of The Press : “He who has the Book has power. » A sentence so beautiful and so profound that this column will end its year on it.
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.