All the data had nowhere to go
Pablo Torre is on episode 506 of TrueAnon1, which is mostly about the NBA-adjacent poker fixing scandals, but touches on sports betting. The fact that data collection is not a neutral activity comes up repeatedly.
Player performance is monitored and measured for non-nefarious reasons: players and teams both benefit from better understanding of strengths and weaknesses in different ways. Pablo makes the case that the mere existence of this data - the predominance of statistical analysis in front offices and the advanced stats published by the leagues - changed the culture of American sports in negative ways. Rationalization of athletic performance led fans to believe the could get some edge (alpha in the financier’s language), and sports gambling was the natural outlet for this.
Black markets were bad enough, but after sports gambling was effectively legalized in the entire USA, goody-two-shoes started to get in on the act, too. If you’re desperate not to fall behind, windfalls are really attractive. If you’ve known any really committed gamblers, you know this is really a path of destruction. It’s leading to behaviors in basketball that we’d eradicated in the US (aside from boxing): players intimidated by organized crime, refs in league with bookies.2
The NBA is particularly affected, though the MLB is, too. Pablo says the leagues are “fracking themselves” extracting money from this gambling culture while destroying the joy in sports that brings the audience in the first place.
This discussion is a great companion to Maciej Cegłowski’s metaphor of data as “toxic waste”. A company retaining data after its useful life presents incredible privacy risks for individuals. I do not think the GDPR has made that much difference here - legitimate business purposes can still be defined with an infinite lifespan. Maciej focuses on these risks to individuals and companies, but I think this near-infinite data collection has had corrosive effects on our culture, too.
Because we routinely hand over data that we must assume will be leaked, we weaken our own expectations for privacy, which makes us more likely to hand over this information over and over again. Because we have this data, we are tempted - nearly compelled - to think of our lives in terms of this data. Systematizing and rationalizing ourselves and our cultural institutions are not leading to human flourishing. Rationalizing commerce has pulled people out of poverty, but we need some way to contain these tendencies.