The intersection of academic life and sports betting has emerged as a significant and under-researched dimension of university student experience in Uganda, where the rapid expansion of betting shops, mobile money platforms, and online sports wagering applications has created pervasive gambling environments that penetrate the rhythms of academic semesters, financial management, and peer relationships. This qualitative study explored how undergraduate students at a Ugandan university experience, rationalize, and are affected by sports betting, with particular attention to the dynamics of the academic calendar, European football's Champions League as a gambling event, and the consequences of gambling behaviour for academic discipline and performance. Employing interpretive phenomenological analysis with twenty-two participants, the study documented a gambling culture structured around the semester's financial cycles, the social rituals of collective watching and wagering, and the complex moral economies through which students justify, conceal, and rationalize their gambling practices. Findings revealed that gambling represents simultaneously a social bonding practice, a financial management strategy, an entertainment resource, and a source of significant financial distress and academic disruption for a meaningful minority of participants. The study calls for university pastoral care systems to develop gambling-specific support resources and advocates for national regulation of predatory gambling marketing practices targeting young people.