2022 NFL Season to attract 46.6m bettors says AGA

The National Football League season this year is bound to be big – very big. In fact, according to new American Gaming Association research, as many as 46.6m Americans, or 18% of the adult population are planning to wager on the NFL. This is a remarkable number of people many of whom will have the opportunity to do so for the first time, including the residents of Kansas for example, where sports gambling launched last Thursday.

The NFL kick-off also coincides with the launch of Responsible Gambling Education Month designed to promote awareness about some of the pitfalls of sports wagering and other forms of gambling and spearheaded by AGA. Commenting on these results, AGA President and CEO Bill Miller noted:

The sustained interest in NFL wagering reflects the growth and continued maturation of legal sports betting across the country. Consumers clearly want legal sports betting options and understand the regulated industry’s foundational commitments to responsibility.

Miller is confident that as legalization efforts continue to break ground into new states, American adults are finally becoming aware of what legitimate betting platforms look like and actively picking them over those based offshore. This season 23m people plan to bet online, an 18% increase from 2021.

Another 6m will be placing bets in-person at a sportsbook, or 2% more than in 2021. The 46.6m people who will be wagering represent a significant number of the 132m adults in the United States who live in a place where betting is regulated. But with so many betting actions involved, AGA reminds us that protecting players and consumers and stressing the importance of responsible gambling remains crucial.

AGA’s efforts have also been paying off. The organization reported that 90% of gamblers said that they have about responsible gaming in the past twelve months. Responsibility is an important tenet of regulated gambling markets in the United States, which is why consumers should be actively driven toward such markets in the first place, Miller insisted.

Meanwhile, AGA also offered an insight into what the favorites for this year’s Super Bowl winners are, with the Buffalo Bills and Tampa Bay Buccaneers like to pick 9% of the total bets. The Los Angeles Rams and Kansas City Chiefs will pick another 8% of the action with the Dallas Cowboys accounting for 7% of the total bets the association predicts. The NFL regular season for 2022 gets underway today!

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