Soccer, Slot Machines, and the World Cup's $13 Billion Question

A reader writes: do point-based sports, especially low-scoring ones like soccer, hockey, and lacrosse, take advantage of the same psychological effects as slot machines? The World Cup is coming, so the timing is right. The question deserves a straight answer before any pastoral reflection: yes, partly. The structure of low-scoring sports shares real features with variable-ratio reinforcement, the same schedule that makes slot machines absorbing. The parallel explains something real, and what it leaves out matters just as much, especially now.

The psychology of the near-miss

In a slot machine, you win infrequently, unpredictably, and just often enough to keep pulling the lever. The variable-ratio schedule is the most resistant to extinction of any reinforcement pattern; the gambler who almost won is more motivated to continue than one who lost cleanly. Behavioral psychologists have documented this since B. F. Skinner's operant-conditioning experiments in the 1950s, and the casino industry has built entire architectures of sound, light, and game design around it.[^1]

Low-scoring sports have a structurally similar feature: goals are rare, which means each one lands with disproportionate force. A 1-0 match in soccer can pivot on a single deflection, a goalkeeper's stretched fingertip, a corner kick that almost cleared. The near-miss accumulates across ninety minutes. Fans are not simply watching; they are processing a long sequence of partial outcomes, a shot that hit the post, a handball the referee did not call, and each near-miss recalibrates expectation without delivering resolution.

Richard von Mises's formal treatment of randomness in probability theory describes this as a "collective" whose limiting frequencies remain stable even as individual outcomes remain unpredictable.[^2] The sports fan is living inside exactly that structure: knowing that goals eventually come without knowing when this one will. Hayek made a related point about complex systems: prediction there "will be confined to such general characteristics of the events to be expected and not include the capacity of predicting particular individual events."[^3] A football match involves too many actors, surfaces, and micro-decisions to reduce to a forecast, but it is governed by stable structural rules. The fan's experience sits at that threshold: enough order to sustain hope, enough disorder to sustain suspense.

What the slot machine comparison gets right, and where it stops

The comparison gets the neurochemistry roughly right. Dopamine release in anticipatory states is higher under uncertainty than under certainty; the brain's reward system chases signals rather than receives them. On that account, a nil-nil match entering its eighty-eighth minute triggers something in a spectator that a 7-0 match does not.

The slot machine analogy breaks down on one count that survives scrutiny, though: the slot machine has no narrative. The reels have no history, no geography, no face. A World Cup match carries the weight of national identity, generational loyalty, and personal memory, a father who watched the 1986 quarterfinal, a daughter who plays on Saturdays, a migrant worker watching a phone screen in a foreign city because his home team is on. Human beings do not experience sequences of events as raw data; they fit them to pre-existing conceptual structures, and when the fit fails, the mismatch is felt before it is understood. A red card in the sixty-seventh minute has to be absorbed into an ongoing story about justice, sacrifice, and belonging. The slot machine has no such story.

The World Cup's real commercial complication

Here the reader's instinct deserves more credit than a simple slot machine comparison allows, and more credit than a simple defense of sport allows too. FIFA's own socioeconomic impact analysis for the 2026 tournament projects roughly $13 billion in FIFA revenue across the 2023–2026 cycle, alongside a far larger $80 billion-plus contribution to global economic output.[^4] Soccer, at its origin a community game requiring nothing more than open ground, has been engineered into one of the largest commercial events on earth. Ticket prices, broadcast rights, corporate sponsorships, and travel costs mean that watching the World Cup in person is structurally a luxury consumption event. The fan pays for the experience, and, unlike the slot machine gambler, actually receives it. That distinction matters morally: an experience delivered as promised is not a fraud in the way a losing pull is a fraud.

But honest transaction and exploitation are not mutually exclusive. Market prices reflect demand rather than intrinsic worth: millions watch soccer, fewer study philosophy, and the market prices accordingly.[^5] The same logic governs the World Cup: the event commands billions because hundreds of millions of people want what it offers. That the desire is genuine does not mean the price is just, or that organizers are indifferent to extracting as much of that desire as the market will bear. The fan gets the experience he paid for, and he also subsidizes a commercial apparatus he did not design and cannot easily refuse.

The slot machine is designed entirely for extraction. The World Cup began as something else and has become, in part, an extraction apparatus built around a genuine human experience, a more complicated moral situation than either pure sport or pure gambling.

The deeper anthropological question

What the reader's question really surfaces is a tension the Catholic Christian tradition has always held: the human person is drawn toward contingency. We do not just tolerate uncertainty; we seek it. We build games, compose narratives, fall in love, all of which involve submitting to outcomes we cannot control. Thomas Aquinas, treating the passions in the Summa Theologiae, described hope as a movement of appetite toward an arduous good that is possible but not yet possessed. The condition of hope is that the outcome is not guaranteed. A soccer match running toward its final minutes, still goalless, is a structured occasion for hope, and hope is a virtue before it is a feeling.

The danger the reader senses is real: when the pull of contingency is harvested by systems designed for extraction, the same psychological mechanism that belongs to hope becomes the engine of compulsion, or at minimum, of commercial capture. The Catholic Christian account of the person does not deny the neurochemistry. It asks what the desire underneath it is for, and whether the particular occasion is ordered toward that end or against it.

A World Cup match, at its best, offers something recognizably human: collective hope, shared suffering, the grace of an outcome no one controlled. The slot machine mimics that structure to profit from it. The World Cup offers the genuine article and profits from it simultaneously. Watch the match. Notice the pull. And ask yourself what you are, underneath the chemistry, actually hoping for, and who is being paid for the privilege of your hoping.

References

[^1]: C. B. Ferster and B. F. Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957).

[^2]: Richard von Mises, Probability, Statistics and Truth (1928; English trans., New York: Macmillan, 1957), on the "collective" and invariance under place selection.

[^3]: Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Pretence of Knowledge" (Nobel Memorial Lecture, December 11, 1974).

[^4]: FIFA, FIFA World Cup 26 Socioeconomic Impact Analysis (2024), digitalhub.fifa.com, projecting approximately $13 billion in FIFA revenue for the 2023–2026 cycle and over $80 billion in global economic output.

[^5]: Gabriel Zanotti and Mario Šilar, Economía para Sacerdotes (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2016).