The impossible but essential disentanglement of football and gambling
Only an outright ban is good enough but can it even be done?
There’s no time for waffle this week. Let’s ’ave it.
The impossible but essential disentanglement of football and gambling
Football’s relationship with the gambling industry stinks of hypocrisy. The stench is never far from the surface, oozing out into the world through every pore.
Sport strikes a difficult balance with gambling. Betting is as old as competition. Sketch little numbers on the backs of a couple of stag beetles and people will make a wager on the winner. But sport also has a purity, a parity, and any skin outside the game threatens to be a corrupting influence. It’s never been any different.
Nevertheless, sport is cohabiting rather uneasily with the enterprise-scale gambling industry of the modern day. Football’s popularity and power make it an inevitable fault line. According to the Gambling Commission, £1.1bn of the UK’s £2.3bn remote gambling volume for the year to March 2023 was accounted for by football betting.
All the while, people who work in football are banned from betting on it and face significant repercussions when they’re caught. The highest profile cases – and we’re talking about the Premier League here, not pub football – tend to come with credible claims of and mandated treatment for gambling addiction.
In 2023, Brentford’s Ivan Toney was suspended for eight months after being found guilty of more than 200 charges. When he returned, he did so in a shirt sponsored by a gambling company. There’s that smell again.
Taking up arms against the rank duplicity in football’s arrangement with the betting business isn’t about being a spoilsport. Such activism seldom ignores the basic social reality that a lot of people like a flutter, nor does it seek to condemn those who do it.
But it’s important to attempt a clear-minded understanding of the ethical and cultural health of the game, not to mention the rights and wrongs of the game’s outward impact on society. The legacy habits of consumers aren’t reason enough to ignore the negative effects of the industry.
Football is slathered from top to toe with betting ads. They’re on the front, back and sleeves of shirts. They’re on boards around pitches and on the side of stadiums. They’re on the television and social media. They’re all over the websites we visit, the apps we use and the newspapers we read.
If we accept that gambling addiction is an ill worth tackling, or at the very least that children should be shielded from it, the total ubiquity of touchpoints in the course of an entirely normal experience of being a football supporter is self-evidently problematic. There have been vague attempts to address it.
The industry agreed a whistle-to-whistle ban on betting ads in 2018. The ban removed ads from television coverage from five minutes before sporting events to five minutes after they end. This led to a large reduction in the number of betting ads aired around football and had a huge impact on the number seen by children.
It’s been a substantial success in several regards but the felt experience of watching a lot of football as an adult in England is still plenty gambly.
In April 2023, the Premier League agreed to outlaw gambling sponsorships from the front of its shirts. Since that commitment, clubs have signed new deals with gambling sponsors. Aston Villa have squeezed in two. The ban won’t come into force until the summer of 2026, when, presumably, sleeve sponsorships will take up some of the slack.
There’s clearly a need to adopt a more hardline approach but the uncomfortable truth is that football and gambling are so woven together, so mutually reliant, that it probably can’t be done.
Those shirt sponsorships – front, back or side – are important sources of partnership revenue for clubs. Most significantly, they’re most important to the clubs who can least afford to abandon them. This double whammy is the root of football’s gambling hypocrisy. Extricating football from that dependency is far from easy.
The football media is in the same sewer. Print media in England has disintegrated and left behind a grimy residue of shonky clickbait and gutter journalism. Quality is difficult to monetise in a quantity game and almost every serious attempt to provide online content of substance has been bankrolled by betting.
For all the criticism of the titles who take that money, the simple fact is there is no money coming from anywhere else. There are no deeper pockets. The gambling industry’s limpet-like desire to buy into football is the football media’s only hope. That made you squirm, didn’t it?
The detrimental impact of the lowest common denominator social media content farted out by these cheap parasites is a bigger cost than people realise, not to mention an indicator of a feeling within the gambling industry that it owns a piece of us or is a part of us.
No matter the apparent feasibility of addressing the issue in any meaningful way, football has a responsibility. Only an outright, football-wide ban on betting ads gets close to adequacy in terms of removing access to a large audience containing countless potential addicts. That’s a tall task. But difficulty is no excuse.
There is an argument that gambling addiction isn’t football’s to fix. The average accumulator punter probably doesn’t much care. Some would sooner aim their guns at perceived stick-in-the-muds than the vast institutions exploiting passions to empty pockets. To a degree, they have right on their side. They are free people in a free country where gambling is legal.
Football has to be better than that. Football is big and rich, powerful and influential. When it speaks, supporters listen. When it makes promises, supporters believe them. In its relationship with gambling, football hasn’t just sold its own soul. It’s selling ours too.
The game is so much part of the cultural fabric of England and many other countries that it cannot deny its responsibility for more than its own wealth. Addiction in a small percentage of the supporters it bombards with gambling ads still means a large number of problem gamblers.
The betting industry’s treatment of that particular subset of customers is deeply sinister and football is serving them up on a platter. Your Saturday accumulator isn’t causing this and nobody wants to take it away from you. But this is the harsh reality of the rest of the iceberg.
Toney returned from his ban, hit the ground running for Brentford and earned himself the England call-up he probably lost through his misdemeanours. Newcastle United’s Sandro Tonali is still on the sidelines after being suspended for ten months for breaching betting regulations in Italy. He will miss UEFA EURO 2024 and the start of the 2024/25 season, and faces additional charges in England.
Football’s hypocrisy is laid bare when players of their stature fall foul of the regulations designed to minimise the negative effects of its association with gambling, but the entanglement of the sport and its most potent remaining benefactors is an everyday issue capable of sickeningly mundane damage.
It’s not an easy knot to untie and football might trip over its loose shoelaces. It’s obliged to try anyway.
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Dessert
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