ASHLYNNE MCGHEE, REPORTER: Melbourne knows how to turn it on for a footy grand final but here at the pub, it’s as much about the bets as the game itself.

VOX POP: I have three apps right now.

VOX POP 2: We don’t know who’s going to win so…

VOX POP 3: So we’ve got a 10-leg same game multi, 10-leg same gamer, beauty!

VOX POP 4: It’s an eight-leg multi with some disposals, goals, a bit of everything.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: A multi combines a series of smaller bets into one larger wager. It’s betting on lots of small outcomes in a game all at once – like who kicks the first goal, who’ll get the most possessions and what the final winning margin is.

Every man we speak to today, has a multi.

VOX POP 4: It’s $10 between us.

VOX POP: I don’t bet any more than $5.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: None of the women do.

VOX POP 5: I’ve never bloody bet in my life!

VOX POP 6: It’s not my favourite thing, I think just enjoy the game you know. Go Cats!

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: Australians are the world’s biggest gambling losers and sports betting is the fastest growing part of the industry.

In just a couple of hours from now, this game, the grand final, will be over and while some punters will win, the vast majority will lose, delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars straight to the betting companies.

David Schwarz was one of the greatest footballers of his generation but off-field his gambling addiction crippled him.

DAVID SCHWARZ, FMR AFL FOOTBALLER: It was all or nothing and it didn’t matter what I won or what I lost. It was just about chasing, chasing, chasing.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: Have you ever worked out how much you lost all up?

DAVID SCHWARZ: Oh, yeah, in between four and five million. So a good chunk of money. It’s a huge amount of money, you know, two lifetimes for that. So, it’s embarrassing, and it’s shameful.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: This morning he’s visiting Melbourne’s Mckinnon College to talk to the Year 11s about gambling…

DAVID SCHWARZ: I’m blowing 10 grand a week. every week $10,000 going down the toilet

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: David Schwarz is the students’ favourite speaker this year probably because his topic isn’t some hypothetical.

STUDENT: I used to mostly bet on like main races and other sporting events, because I’m very into basketball. So I used to bet on a lot of NBA games and stuff.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: We got a group of students together to talk about how they see gambling in sport and some talked about their own experiences. They reckon betting is common among school students.

TEACHER: We tend to find, historically speaking, it is more the male students than female.

STUDENT: You might put a cheeky multi on here and there with your friends or your family, but a lot of people know the limit that if you get the app, it could end badly.

TEACHER: The hardest thing is you don’t see it because it is on their phones. It is what they do outside of hours.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: And when it gets really bad – that’s when people come here to see counsellor Jan Beames.

JAN BEAMES, COUNSELLOR: Most of them tell me that they started gambling at school with their friends.

It’s interesting working with AFL players, I noticed if they had a bad game, or they lost, they didn’t have that adrenaline at the end of the game. So often, that’s when they gamble.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: Betting companies target 18- to 35-year-old men with a promise of mateship, fun and adrenaline. Footy players are their perfect customer.

But by the time they end up here, it’s far from “a bit of fun.”

JAN BEAMES: I don’t hear that in here. They might say that outside of here, but I get the truth in here, usually and it’s one of depression, anxiety. Shame, shame that they’ve lied to people who are closest to them.

TIM COSTELLO, ALLIANCE FOR GAMBLING REFORM: This is a profound cultural shift of mainstreaming it. Play with your mates, this is how you build community, literally has seen sports betting go upstream from the codes of AFL and NRL and own the codes and own the sport and own the culture of what we love about sport.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: There are four ways gambling companies pour money into sport. There’s direct sponsorship, the ads on grounds, a 10 per cent cut of every bet placed on games and the huge TV advertising spend which filters down to the leagues through whopping broadcast rights deals.

The AFL and NRL keep the exact amount under wraps but one industry insider estimates each code gets about $50 million a year.

Sportsbet, owned by Flutter, has the AFL and NRL contracts.

PETER JACKSON, CEO, FLUTTER: Good morning everyone and thank you for joining Jonathan and I …

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: In a call with investors in August, it boasted it has nearly one million monthly gamblers in Australia and that regulation hasn’t had an impact on its huge profits – profits being the money lost by punters but listen to this:

PETER JACKSON: We also continue to increase our focus on personalised generosity. This is the most efficient way to deliver promotional spend to customers and ensure that the right customers are getting the right value at the right time.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: According to the experts we’ve spoken to, he is talking about ‘gateway bets’ that mostly target new or lapsed customers.

TIM COSTELLO: You’re offered odds that are so good, you are guaranteed to win and every person who is a problem gambler says the euphoria from my first win, is what I have always remembered and kept me gambling and why I’m now in trouble. That’s what a gateway bet is.

ASHLYNNE MCGHEE: We put a range of questions to Sportsbet about their business and they declined to comment.

Nearly one thousand gambling ads are shown on free-to-air TV each day. Surveys consistently show most Australians, and all the experts, have had enough.

DAVID SCHWARZ: I hate it. I really, I don’t like it. I think gambling ads normalize what sport is about.

JAN BEAMES: We’ve stopped the smoking ads and a lot of the alcohol ads. Hey, AFL, what about the betting ads?

TIM COSTELLO: In the ideal world, we’d do what Italy and Spain and other nations are doing. We just say you can gamble, absolutely have an app, but you’re not going to have it on free-to-air TV.

DAVID SCHWARZ: There are so many ads re gambling because governments are drunk on the revenue that they get through betting agencies.

STUDENT: It definitely can change the game and how you watch it. I mean I’ve enjoyed footie games and placed a lot of bets. You pretty much just look for your multi-hit. You don’t look for your team to win, you don’t look for the actual enjoyment of the game. All you want is for you to win your bet.