FLORIDA – Nearly one in four registered Florida voters have placed a sports bet using an online or mobile app, but most Floridians oppose expanding legal sports betting and many question the integrity of games tied to wagering, a University of North Florida poll released Thursday found.
The survey of 823 registered voters, conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 3 by UNF’s Public Opinion Research Lab and Sport IMPACT Jax, found 24% of respondents said they had ever placed a sports bet online and 21% had placed a bet at least a few times in the past year. Just 15% want the state to expand legal sports betting; 46% favor restricting or limiting it, and 37% want to keep current regulations.
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The poll paints a concentrated market: online bettors skew male, younger and more educated. Two-thirds of online bettors (67%) said they use the Hard Rock Bet app most often; DraftKings was cited by 12%. The NFL dominated wagers — 80% of online bettors placed bets on the league in the past year — followed by college football, the NBA or WNBA and Major League Baseball.
Wagers tend to be small. Among online bettors, 43% typically wager $1 to $10 per bet, 30% wager $10 to $20 and 16% wager $20 to $50. The median wager on the upcoming Super Bowl was $54, though 30% reported losing more than $100 in a single day at some point, including 7% who said they lost more than $500.
Bettors were cautious about their chances of winning: only 10% said they were very confident they could consistently make money betting on sports, and 83% said they had taken a break from online sports betting for more than a month in the past year.
Advertising and promotions play a role. Ninety-six percent of online bettors reported seeing sports-betting ads in the past year; 31% said ads made them more likely to place a bet. Seventy-three percent said they had placed a bet because of a promotion or bonus offer.
Concerns about integrity were widespread. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they were moderately or very concerned about professional athletes betting on games they were involved in. An overwhelming 82% agreed with the statement, “Because of increased betting, I sometimes question whether player or referee decisions are influenced by gambling interests,” a view shared almost equally by bettors and nonbettors.
“When the majority of fans begin to question the integrity of outcomes, leagues are no longer managing perception, they’re defending credibility in real time,” said Dr. Kristi Sweeney, associate professor of sport management and co-director of Sport IMPACT Jax at UNF. “Our data suggest those expectations are only getting stricter as match-fixing stories accumulate.”
The poll also found that 56% of Floridians believe sports betting increases fan engagement, especially among younger adults and current bettors, but 49% said online sports betting has had a negative effect on sports in general.
The study used a dual-frame sampling design that combined UNF’s statewide online probability panel with a random selection from the Florida voter file. Results were weighted for education, party registration, age, race and ethnicity, sex and geography. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points, including estimated design effect due to weighting.
For more information about the survey and its full results, see the University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab and Sport IMPACT Jax materials.