Agency on Trial in Daily Fantasy Sport

Abstract

The New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against DraftKings and FanDuel in 2015 accusing them of operating illegal gambling platforms. Using actor–network theory, we show how DraftKings, FanDuel, the New York Attorney General, critics, and legislators were preoccupied with how much agency players possessed. They also understood agency as emerging from a sociomaterial arrangement of human and nonhuman entities and saw how agency could be enhanced or limited by introducing new rules, technologies, and constraints. We compare this perspective on agency with theories typically used in sociology of sport and we consider how sociologists can intervene in sport agency.