Today, betting on sports is very, if not immensely, popular. Nowadays the betting business is booming. Betting offices and online bookmakers offer gamblers thousands of betting options on various sporting events. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Middle Ages, sports betting was considered morally reprehensible.
Sports betting before the 19th century
Man is a gambler and believes in luck, so the origins of betting will probably take the researcher back to prehistoric times. But the first mentions of sports betting, which was an analogue, a distant similarity to modern betting, date back to the times of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. In ancient Rome there were gladiator fights. Gladiator fights were a tradition; condemned soldiers and criminal elements of ancient Rome took part in them. In addition, horse racing was very popular among the Romans and people placed bets on it.
The English territories were also under Roman oppression, which may be why the first bets were placed on horse racing. And the first recorded mention of betting dates back to 1512. At the same time, gambling betting became immediately popular among the privileged, wealthy classes.
Sports betting in the 19th and 20th centuries
The development of betting and gambling has taken its own course, and the emergence of bookmaking was a logical stage in this development. The first legal bookmakers emerged in Great Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. William Ogden first took bets on horse racing in 1790.
And in the 19th century, sports betting became even more popular. The Industrial Revolution and the advent of more modern means of communication such as newspapers and telegraphs enabled information about sporting events to be disseminated more quickly and widely. This in turn created favorable conditions for betting to become more accessible and popular.
The first betting office was opened in London in 1850. The first betting shop was opened in Paris in the 19th century. Its owner was Joseph Oller. In 1865, he opened a central cashier in Paris to accept bets from gamblers. This venture was a huge success and led to the opening of a number of other similar establishments. As a result, other sports also became increasingly popular for betting.
The key year for betting was 1961, when betting was officially legalized in the UK on May 1st. By the end of this year, more than ten thousand bookmaker offices were opened in this country alone. Betting quickly gained popularity around the world.
Bookmakers began accepting bets on almost all sports and even non-sporting events. The first online bet was made in 1996. In Germany, in 1973, the federal states were given the right to organize games of chance throughout the country and not just in health resorts. The next stage in the evolution of betting was the emergence of virtual gambling platforms. In the 1990s, bookmakers began accepting bets online.
Since then, the range of different sports bets has expanded significantly. Today you can place bets online on almost every sport there is. There are no limits and only possibilities in the betting industry and it is evolving rapidly.