The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off next week with Canada, the U.S. and Mexico jointly hosting the mega event, and sports betting is expected to surge this year, a new report warns.
With more than 100 games held over six weeks, total betting volumes are expected to exceed US$50 billion worldwide, a report by investment bank Macquire released on Wednesday says.
For each game, the average wagers could exceed half a billion USD, the report added.
The growth of the sports betting market in the last four years, particularly in the U.S., has meant that 65 per cent of the population has access to legal betting markets, as opposed to 40 per cent during the 2022 World Cup, it said.
This edition of the World Cup comes with the skyrocketing popularity of soccer in Canada and the U.S. and has “the potential to introduce new behaviors and incremental wagering, further supported by North America hosting, favorable time zones, and improved product depth,” the report said.
Canadian sports betting companies see the World Cup as “a market-enhancing event,” said Bruce Kidd, professor emeritus of sport and public policy at the University of Toronto.
Ontario alone is likely to see a big surge in wagers this year, he said.
“With Ontario being a highly competitive market with more than 40 gambling companies competing for market share, you can be sure that they will be very aggressive in trying to not only shore up their consumer base, but add to it,” Kidd said.
For many Canadians, this could be the start of a dangerous slide into sports betting as the advertising becomes impossible to avoid, said Andrew Kim, associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s department of psychology.
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“For some people, this might be the start where they might start experiencing some problems related to sports betting. And sports betting or gambling, much like alcohol, is an addiction,” he said.
There has been a “frightening rise in addiction” with the “normalization” of sports betting, Kidd said. And the rise of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi has only lent legitimacy to the practice, he said.
“It’s not going to a bookie or to a physical place like a track and placing a bet on one race or a series of races. This is a rapidly, lightning-fast opportunity to bet on any aspect of sport,” he added.
Kidd pointed to the popularity of “prop bets” or proposition bets. These are bets on individual events in the game.
“In a baseball game, where there are 300 pitches thrown, you could bet on all 300 pitches and place 300 bets if you could. The betting apps are psychologically engineered to capture betters — to addict,” he said.
In soccer, this theoretically means people can bet on anything from the result of a single penalty shot to a free kick.
Prop bets have made sports betting apps feel more like slot machines at a casino, Kim said.
“If you’re just going to bet on who’s going to win, the risks, I would say, are relatively light or less risky compared to if you’re going to bet on these micro prop bets while watching the game and you’re doing multiple of these bets and drinking — that’s going to be higher risk,” he said.
Sports betting has been associated with increased risks of suicide, substance use disorders, crime and broader social harms, a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in September 2025 found.
“The stats for addiction in Canada are simply frightening,” Kidd said.
These risks of addiction get worse if you are drinking and betting at the same time, Kim said.
“Drinking and betting on sports at the same time is a pretty dangerous mix,” he said.
“Set a limit, set a financial budget in terms of how much you can realistically afford to spend and treat it as entertainment,” he added.
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