Óscar’s euphoria after Spain’s World Cup win resembled other bursts of joy: ecstasy, the national team shirt and arms raised for a collective triumph. But it was also an intimate celebration, because this time he didn’t have any betting slips crumpled in his hands. “This is the first World Cup I’ve watched without betting; during Qatar it was really bad and I can’t even calculate how deep in debt I got — I bet on every match,” he says. He is 25 and describes himself as “a gambler in advanced rehabilitation, although I’ll be a gambler forever.” Agustín, 37, had to watch it in a safe environment, at home with his girlfriend. He has been in therapy for nine months for sports-betting addiction, but has been gambling for almost a decade. He has no access to money or cards. “I didn’t even consider going to a bar to watch it, because now there are machines there that let you bet and no one asks for ID,” he says. At 39, Carlos calls himself a “rehabilitated gambler” and takes detours on the street to avoid passing betting shops. If someone saw Sergio, 37, enjoying the final at home with his son, they would notice nothing unusual. He is blind and, listening to the match, feared it would go to penalties because that could recreate the adrenaline rush he gets from betting. He hasn’t bet since March, his phone app reminds him.

Sergio, Carlos, Óscar, and Agustín are what experts call “functional addicts”: they have jobs, families and apparently normal lives, but suffer from an “invisibilized illness,” in the words of Consuelo Tomás, director of the Valencian Institute of Gambling Disorder and Non-Toxic Addictions, the first center in Spain specialized in gambling addiction. “Because gambling addiction doesn’t bother anyone and it generates huge revenues. Since these aren’t people whose behavior causes public disturbances, it seems like this doesn’t exist,” she adds. The expert notes that the World Cup represented a “high risk” for these patients and their families, who found it excruciating to isolate themselves from the frenzy. “Everywhere you go people are talking sport, there are matches all the time, and sports betting enjoys a very different status than slot machines, for example. Rather than being normalized, it’s viewed positively, and the advertising bombardment is constant,” Tomás says.

The 2026 World Cup has broken all records for betting, both online and in person. “The impact of these illnesses is undervalued, because the data show it affects about 1% of the population, but of course we’re talking about half a million people and it’s as if that devastation only affects them,” says Mariano Chóliz, a professor and one of Spain’s leading experts on the psychology of addictions.

The first thing gamblers regret when they open up about their illness is the ripple effect of destruction it causes. Sergio gambled away the down payment on his apartment and ended up losing his wife. Óscar’s parents had to face a €10,000 ($11,380) debt. Carlos stole from his business’s customers. Agustín bet all the money saved for his wedding, which never took place. All of them, except Óscar, have voluntarily registered on the “self-exclusion” list, a public-administration registry that bars them from entering betting shops or casinos and also from playing online.

“One of the first things we teach when they arrive in therapy is stimulus control, from giving up having a cellphone to giving up watching the World Cup, and in today’s context that is increasingly difficult,” explains Saúl D’Oleo Rojas, a clinical psychologist at Patim, an organization specialized in treatment and with special consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council. The data they’ve been collecting since 2001 are more alarming than they seem, because they indicate that the geography of gambling has changed and there has been a move between online and in-person gambling; now 40% of pathological gamblers are addicted to sports betting. And they are increasingly younger.

The spiral of losses

They all start the same way: betting in a social context, one or two euros with friends on important matches, and it quickly becomes a private, personal compulsion. “The first day I went alone to a betting shop I put in €5, and I won more than €1,000. At the time I was starting a business and I knew what 12-hour days to earn that money meant. There I achieved it in minutes,” says Carlos. But as Sergio reveals: “Winning is the worst thing that can happen to you, especially at the beginning. Because you think you did it because you know so much about soccer, and that you are in control.” Consuelo Tomás points out that is the addictive potential: “When they win, they attribute the merit to themselves, to their knowledge, to their strategy. And when they lose, the referee, the player, or the pitch is to blame. They don’t accept that, whether they win or lose, they don’t control it. Sports betting is a game of chance, something random and unpredictable.”

And it’s also riddled with myths. That image of the addict who plays for adrenaline, risk, and the dopamine high is true, but only at the start. And it’s part of the trap. “I was betting my salary, which was very low. And I won, okay. But then I lost, and I kept playing to recover what I’d lost. For that I had to put in more money, so I asked friends, took quick loans, stole from my parents secretly. I needed more and more money to pay the loan interest; I entered a loop,” Óscar says.

They all remember the initial ecstasy as fleeting. And poisoned. “There came a point when my life consisted of sneaking away all the time to keep betting. I would say I was going to the supermarket and place a bet. At work, I did it on my phone. I spent the whole day watching corners, cards, goals, second-division leagues, leagues in Saudi Arabia, in China. I bet on everything,” Sergio recalls. The sum of money he had invested was already so large that he had to redouble his efforts to recover it. As a blind person, he never encountered barriers: “The betting shop staff would place the bets for me and with my screen reader I could do it myself with mobile apps. It was all made easy.”

Mariano Chóliz also demystifies the atmosphere in betting venues: “There is nothing euphoric there, no crowds celebrating goals happily because they’ve won money. The atmosphere is much murkier, because people are trying to recover, calculating how much they have to win to stop.” But they don’t stop. Sergio was stopped against his will. “The moment they saw I was winning four, five or six times in a row, the machine where I had entered my ID to play would cut me off. I’d go to the machine next to it until the same thing happened,” he recalls.

Chóliz believes regulation should work the other way around. “There should be a mechanism that limits losses in these games, to respect the freedom of those who gamble without any pathology and to establish a criterion for those who do. But that would clash directly with their business model, which is so toxic,” he argues. The house always wins and the player always loses, ultimately. And not only money. Carlos remembers every detail of the day he climbed up to the rooftop to end the debts and everything else. Sergio came close too. “Pathological gambling is the third disorder in suicide rates, only behind bipolar disorder and major depression,” Chóliz emphasizes.

The World Cup is over, but Óscar, Carlos, Agustín, and Sergio do not feel relief. Because, as they say, La Liga is coming, other competitions too, and the wheel never stops. They feel the limits imposed on betting advertising are paper thin and add that, even if they have “self-excluded” from entering venues, in bars no one will ask for their ID if they decide to bet. “I have an ad blocker for betting sites, but I read sports newspapers and find masked stories that are actually sold to you as something wonderful. Or I see Iker Casillas advertising it, and in stadiums there are bets on every billboard,” Carlos says.

They agree they feel like “collateral damage” from a multimillion-dollar industry. Experts agree that current regulations are neglecting a problem that grows exponentially each year, because “other interests prevail, which are not those of public health,” in D’Oleo’s words.

All are in treatment, some have relapsed and returned to the betting slips. They and their families continue paying loans and debts. And none has watched soccer again with the same excitement as when they placed their first bets, when they risked everything on a single goal. They don’t miss it, because the worst thing was winning. In the end, it was always a defeat.