Over the last fifteen years, Colombia has seen an exponential expansion of legal online sports betting that has transformed the way people engage with sports. Gambling platforms have become deeply embedded in professional soccer, appearing on jerseys, advertisements on radio and TV, stadiums, and tournaments. Betting logos, slogans, and odds are now an ordinary part of how games are watched and discussed. This expansion unfolds within a broader landscape of economic precarity. For many people, work is unstable, informal, and unevenly distributed across regions. Secure and stable employment remains a privilege inaccessible to at least half of the working force, and financial uncertainty structures everyday decision-making. It is within these conditions that sports gambling acquires its particular force. Legal betting platforms open alternative pathways for imagining stability and mobility, even as they generate new forms of risk and exposure.

In this context, speculation appears as a medium to think about the future. My work explores the ways professional sports gamblers speculate about match outcomes, but also how they speculate about their lives within capitalism. Each bet animates a potential world in which events unfold differently, and lives are reconfigured. A game where the underdog wins in an unthinkable way; a last-minute goal that confirms a strong statistical trend; a hunch that made a gambler place a bet on a live game no one thought was worth watching. These speculative practices are never only about sports and not as easily captured by words or narratives. They are also about families, debts, obligations, aspirations, and the fragile possibility of a good life that might briefly come into view or disappear altogether. 

I met Robert, a Venezuelan gambler living in Colombia, last summer over a Zoom call. We had exchanged a couple of messages, I had followed him on Instagram, and I was a member of his gambling advice messaging group. Every day before noon, he would send his followers betting advice on matches of the day and post about it on all of his social media. But I was also interested in how his daily routine was structured. This is what he told me: I wake up around 8:30 a.m. and start by checking the statistics systems I pay for. It’s not just my own analysis anymore. I always need to double-check what the system gives me, sometimes, I find things that make no sense. After reviewing the systems, I spend a lot of time analyzing each sport. For soccer, I always look at the last five matches for each team, at least, how they perform at home, how they do away.... For baseball, the key is the starting pitcher, since the same teams often face each other three days in a row. So I study the starting pitcher’s stats: their ERA, their effectiveness, how they’ve performed recently, win streaks, records…. By around noon, all the picks are ready. But I always need to check the odds at all the available sportsbooks in Colombia and try to have an edge there as well. I always try not to send a prediction last-minute, that feels very unprofessional to me, so I have to work intensely in the mornings or early afternoon, depending on the matches of the day.

Speculation is a practice oriented toward uncovering a hidden future, making it possible for gamblers to act based on technologies and logics. The gamblers that I work with engage in a variety of anticipatory practices: They analyze statistical trends, rely on gut feelings, conduct research on details invisible to bookmakers, and seek out edges. These practices often unfold on the frontiers of capitalism, informal and precarious, yet they make use of deeply capitalist tools and logics. Inspired by Laura Bear’s 2020 paper, “Speculation: A Political Economy of Technologies of Imagination,” I see speculation not just as an economic calculation, but an embodied, ethical, and epistemological activity.

But tracing some of these practices is sometimes a challenge as an ethnographer. Some of the conversations I had with gamblers forced me to think about alternative ways of capturing what they told me. Writing seemed to be limiting the way I captured their narratives. That is why I started thinking about how alternative forms of capturing details of the lives of gamblers could allow me to further explore speculative practices.

 What does speculating about match outcomes do for gamblers like Robert? When I asked, he said that gambling has transformed the way he looks at the future. Gambling with a rational mindset and a long-term mentality has reshaped how he imagines what lies ahead. He no longer thinks about getting rich overnight from a single huge parlay; instead, he envisions progress in smaller, deliberate steps. He dreams of having a house, but he is building it step by step, floor by floor. As he explained, he began slowly, laying the foundation and adding piece by piece over months of discipline. This is a stark contrast to his earlier days betting on horse races in Venezuela, when a good win meant spending everything that same night. Now, his priorities have shifted toward stability and responsibility, toward becoming a “man of the household” rather than someone who once lived only for the present moment. Still, as a migrant in a new country, he faces moments of uncertainty and doubt, which makes what he has achieved feel even more significant. He told me, “I’m very thankful to God because I’ve already built two floors of my house. And I think very few migrants manage to own a home in another country, so I’m extremely grateful for that.”

This type of speculation is more like an incremental futurism that is grounded in small steps toward a desired goal. Speculation here is understood as a “futural orientation” that emerges in gaps of indeterminacy, moments when the future cannot be clearly anticipated (Bryant and Knight 2019). This prompts individuals like Robert, and the communities he is a part of, to engage in practices as ways of imagining possible futures to navigate uncertainty. Especially in periods of foreclosed possibilities, Bryant and Knight (2019) claim that actors engage more intensely in speculative practices around markets and opportunities. This, I argue, is precisely the way gamblers engage with sports gambling: as an avenue to respond to high rates of informality, migration, and unstable work conditions.

In these two ways of understanding speculation, I position my work with sports gamblers in Colombia. Attending both processes, an incremental futurism that is shaped though their hopes and aspirations, and anticipatory regimes in order to try to predict the future of matches, allows me to understand speculative practices on two different levels.

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Thinking about and writing about speculation is not easy. As I began my exploratory fieldwork, I felt the constant need to imagine different futures, to try to grasp a reality that was not yet there. At times, during my first summer of fieldwork, I felt that writing and taking notes were not working for me. That’s when I took Adam Rosenblatt’s course, Graphic Ethnography, and I discovered the power of comics and drawing to unleash the boundaries of writing. To do so, I started to use a sketchbook that went hand-in-hand with my field notes and allowed me to ask myself questions about my project, to draw about it, and to let my thoughts unfold through both writing and sketching. When I hit a rough patch in my field notes and journaling, drawing helped me reconnect with reflection and exploration in my practice. My sketchbook became not only a place to record but also a space to think, to notice, and to reconnect with the attentiveness of fieldwork.

Although I initially used my sketchbook to rebuild my journaling habit, I have since approached it more intentionally as a space to explore ideas and experiment with visual storytelling. I often sketch speculative concepts related to my research. One exercise I found especially generative was trying to visualize la fija, the term gamblers use for a bet that is “sure to happen.” In the image below, I explored different ways of representing this idea through drawings and phrases I encountered in my fieldwork. Translating la fija into visual form made me more aware of the layers of speculation, belief, and uncertainty embedded in the concept, dimensions that are less visible when I just took notes. Drawing also allowed me to bring multiple voices and perspectives into the same space, expanding how I think about what lies behind a term that gamblers use almost daily on social media.

More so, thinking about how sketchbook notes could translate into a graphic ethnography has allowed me to see comics as a speculative practice, which has opened up the door for me to approach concepts and the lives of gamblers. This is why I see “speculation as a methodology that accommodates our awareness that things could be different, that there exists an alternative to analytical assessments that can be useful in navigating a world of systemic failures, new levels of complexity, and unobtainable standards” (Rao, Krishnamurthy, and Kuoni 2015, 11). Thus, speculation is a constant part of my project, not only in the ways sports gamblers try to predict match outcomes, but also in the way they deal with uncertainty and aspiration. And for me, I have found graphic ethnography to be a tool that allows me to explore ideas and concepts more fluidly. Attending to these layered forms of speculation, both in the field and through experimental methods like drawing, has allowed me to better grasp how futures are actively constructed, negotiated, and felt in everyday life. Speculation facilitates for me a commitment to alternative futures and to “the imaginary as a realm of the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities or conditions” (Rao, Krishnamurthy, and Kuoni 2015, 11).

As a third-year PhD student preparing for my field year, I came to this method almost by accident. Taking the Graphic Ethnography course was not something I initially planned as methodological training, but it felt like an interesting class to learn something new. As I had no previous drawing skills the class presented as a challenge, but what emerged surprised me. The sketchbook became a space where I could sit with concepts and explore graphic ways of dealing with them. And taking the visual as a possible outlook for the products of my research became a useful avenue to consider how to translate questions and findings into drawings and comics. Speculation, as I was encountering it in my research, was slippery: It lived in gestures, in hunches, in the gap between a bet placed and a match not yet played. Drawing let me hold the ambiguity open a little longer. When I tried to visualize la fija, I was not illustrating something I already understood, I was thinking through it, and the thinking looked different on the page than it did in prose.

Using a sketchbook is a genuine methodological tool, not a supplement or a creative detour. Additionally, graphic ethnographies are not only ways to share research but a way to train a different kind of attention, one that is slower, more spatial, and more comfortable with incompleteness. They also make visible the layers of interpretation that writing can sometimes go over too quickly. Going into fieldwork, I will carry my sketchbook alongside my field notes—not as a way to produce images, but as a way to keep asking questions about what speculation feels like, looks, and does for the people I work with, and for me.