Darragh McGee

We will.

Well, I mean, it's a remarkable piece of kind of corporate engineering to overturn what was, as you've laid out there, a century's worth of kind of moral apathy.

And I lay out my first bet, you know, that I placed in Donegal as an 18-year-old.

And it's exactly as you say, you know, I didn't want to tell my father where I was going.

lied to my granny, whose house is very close to where the bookmaker was.

And it was exactly that.

It was something that was quite seedy.

And I guess the direct answer to your question is a mix of things.

Technology definitely changes that.

You can't underestimate the

the extent to which the smartphone makes all this seem kind of more modern, more amenable to a younger generation.

But you also can't underestimate everything I've laid out there in terms of the marketing, and that is seeing national heroes and icons tell you that this is part of fandom.

Yes, this is key.

There's a reason that in the UK they spend two billion on marketing every year, you know, and it's not just about volume, it's about the framing.

You know, framing gambling as a kind of add-on to fandom was a genius piece of the puzzle, really.

bets can be placed yeah the data revolution is part of all this you know it's it's absolutely and and that's the surveillance there's two dimensions to that fandom has been changed by data you know i was doing another interview earlier and i just spoke about the first time in a pub i found myself talking about the heat map of one of my favorite institutions

And that's a real moment to check yourself when kind of, you know, fan punditry in the pub is talking about heat maps.

And I think there's, you know, all of us as sports fans today, we have adopted that language, the language of XG, as you put it, and the rest of them.

And so that's penetrated fandom in a way.

no that hasn't happened to me yet no but it has happened to other people oh absolutely absolutely and that's kind of the warped i speak in the book about the warped nature of fandom amongst all this and of course i find myself being asked a lot about kind of the the more serious harms uh connected to gambling and you know and habitual patterns and the truth is one of the things that the book lays out is is the very mundane loss of what fandom can be yes there's