Lost Bets: An Investigation into Sports Gambling

Sports betting has never been so present, so accessible, or so aggressively marketed. A goal, a yellow card, a tennis match on the other side of the world — there is always something to bet on, always a click promising easy money.

This Belgian documentary follows the people caught inside that system. Through close observation of players, conversations with addiction specialists, and testimony from within the industry itself, it traces the gap between the leisure activity that operators sell and the reality lived by those who cannot stop.

Depression, isolation, financial ruin — the consequences are well-documented. What director Florian Vallée and writer Olivier Bailly pursue is something harder to pin down: the deliberate architecture behind those consequences. Their investigation exposes how private operators have built growth strategies on technology designed to maximise compulsive behaviour, while deploying lobbying and legislative pressure to limit accountability.

The film draws on the analysis of expert Jean-Michel Costes, who describes the core logic plainly. An entire economic sector, he argues, builds its prosperity on the losses of its most vulnerable users. That is not a side effect. It is the model.

A clear-eyed, socially urgent piece of journalism in documentary form.