“Action on the Game”: Sports Gambling as Fan Identity and Transactional Participation

Abstract

This article describes Fox Sports’ depiction of sports gambling following the Supreme Court decision legalizing this activity at the federal level. The gambling personas offered by Fox Sports programming are particularly worthy of analysis, given efforts by media networks and sports leagues to rehabilitate the image of the gambler. Applying a critical discourse analysis of industry trade press, mobile app design, and sports gambling television programming, this article demonstrates how the persona of the “benign degenerate” is offered as a masculine fan identity designed to align gambling with more common social tv practices and interactive “transactional participation.” The introduction of this new sports gambling persona challenges previous depictions of sports gambling that have categorized this behavior as a form of financialized citizenship.