INTRODUCTION

Betting on sports dates back several thousand years. In the ancient Olympic Games, spectators gathered from all over the Greek Empire in Olympia to watch athletes compete in multiple disciplines, such as running, chariot racing and boxing. Research often debates the exact date of the first games, traditionally assumed to be 776 BC, but places the first betting activities in this context (Weeber 1991). Scholars also report betting activities in the Circus Maximus of Rome, where Emperor Augustus gathered the best athletes for competition (Schreiber ). Betting and gambling have continued to exist for centuries with fluctuations in public perception, being viewed as either a welcome distraction or a bad habit to be outlawed (Rose 1991).

Some sports disciplines have played an important role in the survival and spread of gambling activities. In the eighteenth century horse races were the preferred event for the British elite to gamble on, with the habit quickly spreading to the working class and to other countries (McKibbin ; Huggins ). The modern world inherited a culture of sports betting that has grown exponentially. Currently, the number of disciplines and platforms available for sports betting is immense. Research identifies several factors that have played an important role in this growth and highlights the development of the internet and e-commerce as driving factors in recent decades (Pilling & Bartlett ; Lopez-Gonzalez, Estévez & Griffiths 2017).

Consequently, the field of economics started not only to analyse this particular market (Sauer ; Levitt ; Humphreys ) but also to use betting data to study other issues (Paul et al. ; Soebbing, Wicker & Watanabe ; Gomez-Gonzalez et al. ). For example, in sports economics, probabilities of winning extracted from betting odds are used to analyse one of the most recurrent questions in the field, namely the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis (Peel & Thomas 1988; Pawlowski 2013; Coates, Humphreys & Zhou 2014). Figure 13.1 shows the percentage of articles in the Journal of Sports Economics (JSE) that either analyse the sports betting market or use sports betting data with a different purpose.