Gamblification, Fintech, and Fan Financial Wellbeing: A Scoping Review Through a Social-Sustainability Lens

The gamblification of sport has entered a fintech-enabled phase in which betting is no longer merely advertised around sport but designed into the act of watching it—continuous, mobile, frictionless, and seamlessly financed. Because this transformation shortens the pathway between impulse and expenditure, its consequences are increasingly financial; yet the evidence on how it affects the financial wellbeing of fans has not been synthesised. This scoping review, conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, mapped research linking the gamblification of sport—in both its marketing and its fintech dimensions—to fan financial wellbeing. Three databases (Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed), supplemented by hand-searching and a Google Scholar sweep, yielded 69 included studies. The evidence is young, expanding, and still largely exploratory in character. It is weighted heavily toward the marketing channel (advertising, sponsorship, inducements, normalisation), which is mature and well-theorised, whereas the fintech affordances of the betting product form a distinct but smaller literature, and financial wellbeing is most often reached only indirectly through marketing-driven overspend. Only five of the 69 studies directly measured a financial outcome, and all five lay within the fintech channel; the intersection at the centre—where the redesigned product meets the financial lives of vulnerable fans—remains largely unoccupied. We reframe this gap as a question of the social sustainability of sport, bearing on equity, wellbeing, and responsible consumption (SDGs 10, 3, and 12), and set out a research and governance agenda to address it.