Fair Game? Inside Britain’s Football Betting Crisis

High Stakes

Britain’s £15.1bn gambling industry and its well-funded lobbying operation would like you to believe that the problem lies with Felix. Felix certainly isn’t looking to blame anyone else. ‘It’s my doing,’ he says. ‘It spiralled out of control through me and no one else.’ Still, the lax security checks at the bookies, the gambling adverts at the grounds, on TV, within computer games, all the WhatsApp bet chat among his friends – none of this can have helped.

And the fact that there could be as many as 1.4 million people with gambling addictions in the UK, according to GambleAware – and that, according to Public Health England, someone in England kills themselves every day due to gambling – suggests that it’s not just Felix’s problem. It suggests Britain has a gambling problem. And once you begin looking at the influence of gambling on our national game, it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

For seven Premier League clubs (Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brentford, Burnley, Everton, Fulham and West Ham), their primary shirt sponsor is a gambling company – but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers at Bristol University counted 6,996 separate pro-gambling messages during a weekend of Premier League action. The league below is literally called the SkyBet Championship. You can’t even escape the messaging on radio: on TalkSport, commentators are paid to offer live in-play betting odds.

This is an unbelievably lucrative business: Bet365, founded in Stoke in 2000, is the world’s largest online betting company and its CEO, Denise Coates, earned £221 million last year. You can read all about her £90 million house and two helicopters online. It’s impossible to calculate just how much of her salary is paid for by at-risk customers. But according to statistics from the National Centre for Social Research, 86% of gross online gambling profits come from just 5% of users, while the Gambling Commission reports that 35% of people with a gambling disorder receive daily incentives to gamble.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the industry itself disputes many of the figures relating to harm, pointing to difficulties in collecting accurate self-reported data (Bet365 didn’t respond to a request for comment). However, consultant psychologist Mark Gaskell, who runs the NHS’s Northern Gambling Service, is in no doubt about the scale of the problem. ‘This is not about a minority of so-called flawed individuals,’ he says. ‘The gambling industry is targeting the population en masse and appealing to universal decision-making and biases and susceptibility.’

Dr Gaskell is quick to stress that he’s not against gambling in itself. ‘Gambling could be something that’s done recreationally for a bit of fun.’ But the UK did not create a world-beating gambling industry on the back of a few fans betting on their teams. ‘This industry isn’t interested in recreational gamblers. They want to move you to the most addictive products… and our laws and regulations are not protecting children and they’re not protecting the young men who are experiencing the most harm.’

Dr Gaskell set up his first clinic for gambling addicts in Leeds in 2019. He was struck by how many of the men who turned up were wearing football shirts. And how many of those shirts were sponsored by gambling companies.

‘There’s a pandemic,’ says James, 51, a Manchester City fan and recovering addict, who estimates he has gambled over half a million pounds in his lifetime (including his mother’s £90,000 mortgage). He can speak at length about the guilt; the lies; the resentments; the long, hard road to recovery. He credits Gamblers Anonymous with saving his life. But he’s more worried about the younger men he’s seeing. ‘There are thousands of kids who are in this scenario because of football betting, believe me, and they cannot get away from it. It’s in their head. It never stops.’

Changing the Game

The mildly encouraging news is that after years of campaigns and warnings, Britain is slowly acknowledging that, yes, we do have a gambling problem – the crucial first step in actually doing something about it. Last year, the government published a long-delayed review of gambling laws in belated acknowledgement that the industry has mutated out of all recognition in the online era. (Tony Blair’s government liberalised gambling laws in 2005, opening the way for today’s mega profits, but no one seemed to have anticipated the invention of the iPhone in 2007.) Among the proposed changes: a maximum £2 stake on online slot machines (widely viewed as the most corrosive form of online gambling) and a statutory levy on gambling companies to fund independent research (currently, most research into gambling harms is funded by the industry itself).

A spokesperson for the Gambling Commission described the proposed laws as ‘a coherent package of proposals that we believe can significantly support and protect consumers, and improve overall standards in the industry’.

What the new laws will not do, however, is curb advertising or sponsorship. It’s true that the Premier League has announced – after widespread outcry – that it will ban front-of-shirt gambling sponsors by the 2026/27 season. The Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) – which exists to promote the industry – disputes the link between advertising and problem gambling. Although it has welcomed the shirt ban and cites other voluntary measures, such as a ‘whistle-to-whistle’ ban on betting adverts in football matches, introduced in 2019.

Nevertheless, research has shown that front-of-shirt sponsorship accounts for just 7% of the pro-gambling messages that are seen during a game – and football grounds are still full of gambling billboards, which are prominent even on the supposedly ad-free Match Of The Day highlights programme on the BBC. In 2020, researchers at Ipsos Mori and the University of Stirling found that 96% of people aged 11 to 24 had seen gambling marketing messages in the past month.

Annie Ashton discovered as much when she took her 11-year-old son to watch Leicester City last season – something her late husband Luke always used to do, until he took his own life in 2021 after relapsing into a gambling addiction. ‘All I wanted to do was take my son to the football and I was faced with flashing adverts for the very thing that killed his father,’ she says. ‘It was a very bitter experience.’

Luke Ashton’s story shows how gambling can spiral out of control, extremely fast, with few outward signs. Annie describes her late husband as a loving father with everything to live for. ‘Him and my son, they were each other’s shadows. They were so involved in each other’s lives.’ He also prided himself on being a provider. ‘He was a saver. Every bit of overtime he did, he put money away.’

She only discovered he had been gambling after she accidentally opened a letter from the bank addressed to him and realised they were thousands of pounds in debt. ‘I confronted him about it – and he just said straight away, “I’ve been gambling. I’ve been gambling way beyond my means and I’ve been taking out loans to fund the gambling.”’

The pair of them worked to clear the debts. They moved house and Annie started a new job. It felt like a fresh start. But during the second Covid lockdown, Luke was furloughed from his job at a printing firm and suddenly had time on his hands. When he died in April 2021, Annie had no idea that he had fallen into gambling again.

Annie now works with the charity Gambling With Lives and has been campaigning for what she calls Luke’s Law, a ban on the free bets and lures that the gambling companies use to encourage people to gamble. ‘Previously, Luke had opened up lots of different accounts. This is what his friends had told him about. You open lots of accounts. You take advantage of the free offers for new sign-ups. Then whatever you get from those free bets, you put into the exchange sites. The more you spend on the exchange site, the more rewards you get, which induces you to gamble more.’

Luke’s phone records showed that he had been bombarded with promotions – but almost nothing by way of discouragement. ‘There were times when he was gambling 14 hours a day, placing over 100 bets in a day.’ He would receive generic emails reminding him that he’d been on the site for a long time, but that wasn’t enough to deter him. ‘During the inquest, what we discovered was that there are individuals who should be looking at that data. It should have triggered an intervention. But he slipped through the net.’

Football is almost always the first exposure that young men have to betting culture, says Matt Zarb-Cousin, a campaigner for gambling reform and co-founder of the app Gamban. ‘What do young men like? They like football. So the gambling industry says, let’s market around football. We can establish some habits and some associations with the sport they love at a time when their brains haven’t yet learned how to gauge risk.’ The second part is more insidious. ‘Once they’ve acquired their customers’ data, that’s when you get things like in-app marketing, cross-selling, free spins, bonuses and you’re on to slots and casino content.’ Gambling companies actually make most of their money from online slot machines. But this isn’t what’s featured in the advertising. ‘They don’t market that stuff on TV. They market football.’

Even if you do stick to the beautiful game, you will be pushed towards riskier forms of ‘in-play’ betting. Darragh McGee, an associate professor at the University of Bath, who has studied gambling and football culture, gives me an insight into how this works by pulling up his own social media profile. ‘If the algorithms have profiled you as a sports fan, as they have me, you’ll also see constant adverts for bets, with odds that seem too good to be true. I’m looking right now. Manchester United are playing Aston Villa and Marcus Rashford is 50/1 to have a shot on target. Now, if you know anything about football, you’ll know that’s fairly likely to happen.’

It’s an iron law of betting that if something looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true. The 50/1 offer is, as it turns out, only available to new customers. Should you win £50, your winnings will arrive in bet credits as opposed to cash. At which point, Dr McGee points out, you will have handed over your bank details and experienced the early thrill of a win. ‘You put in £1. You think you have £50. Lots of gamblers will tell you that it begins to feel like Monopoly money, it’s not real to them, even though they’re moving more and more money from their actual bank accounts into the apps.’ (A BGC spokesperson responded that offers and promotions are ‘an important part of customer experience’ and flagged concerns that banning them could ‘drive punters to unregulated, unsafe black market gambling sites, which do offer promotions’.)

Dr McGee sees the current situation as resulting from a ‘perfect storm’: the lax gambling reforms of the Blair era in no way anticipated the way the smartphone would revolutionise the industry. ‘In the analogue world, gambling was a day at the races or a trip to the casino. These were social settings that were at once removed from your everyday life… but what we’re talking about with phones is the opposite of that,’ he explains.

However, the third development is harder to unpick. It’s the commercialisation of sport itself and, in particular, the transformation of football into a multibillion-pound global entertainment behemoth. The scheduling of matches for TV, one after another, means you can binge-watch football in a way that just wasn’t possible a couple of decades ago, and with this comes the ‘repetitive cycles’ that build up to an addiction. Here’s James, the Man City fan, describing a typical weekend: ‘My gambling started on a Friday evening with all the European games. There’d always be a decent Bundesliga match on a Friday evening. La Liga, too. You could tie a nice little accumulator together and that would run all the way through to Saturday lunchtime, the 3pm kick-offs, the evening games. And I couldn’t wait for Sundays. You’d have the French Ligue 1 at midday, the Premier League matches, the Italian league…’ This was all so he could ‘build up a nice lump’ to take into the week’s European games.

Against the Odds

The thing that’s sad about this is how football – which many of us associate with family, friends, community and happy childhood memories – has been hijacked. ‘We think of sport as being inherently healthy,’ says Dr McGee. ‘But it’s become a conduit to a world that we know is harmful.’ Indeed, the more you look into it, the more it begins to feel as if football is sponsoring gambling rather than the other way around.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a little experiment you can run on any children you have in your life. First, ask them how many cigarette brands they can name. My football-mad son, Teddy, 10, couldn’t name any – which is reassuring, as I reckon I could have reeled off quite a few when I was his age. Then, ask how many gambling companies they can name. At this question, Teddy lit up. ‘Oh… Betfair? Bet365. Paddy Power, is that one? Erm… who are Newcastle sponsored by again? Fun something?’ Newcastle’s official Asian betting partner is, indeed, Fun88. (Fun fact: sponsoring English football clubs offers a convenient way for Asian betting companies to reach the enormous audience for Premier League football in China, where gambling is banned.) Teddy might be legally unable to gamble for another eight years, but his brand recall is already excellent.

Many of the independent researchers I speak to (those who don’t accept industry funding) express concerns about the way the industry, as a whole, has shaped the messages around gambling – similar to how the tobacco industry sought to downplay the harms of cigarettes.

You have probably seen the adverts, ‘When the fun stops, stop.’ These were produced by the gambling industry as an attempt to show they really do care about problem gamblers, meanwhile reminding us that gambling is fun. ‘It’s anything but an explicit warning,’ says May van Schalkwyk, a public health doctor who studies the ways that ‘addiction industries’ like gambling seek to influence debate. ‘It doesn’t say gambling can harm anyone. Or gambling can destroy people’s lives. The implicit message is, “It’s not our product that’s the problem. It’s not the way we’re being regulated that’s the problem. It’s you. You need to learn to use it responsibly.”’

Gambling policy in the UK has long favoured the gambling industry, Dr van Schalkwyk argues. Even the term ‘problem gamblers’ is a source of concern. ‘The idea that there is a group who are vulnerable and a group who aren’t is contrary to what we know about the way things ebb and flow over time,’ she says. ‘If you lost your job or your partner left you in the morning, you will be more vulnerable that evening in a way you weren’t before. We’re all susceptible at different times.’

But it’s worth remembering that the tobacco industry was, eventually, regulated. One of the reasons my son couldn’t name any cigarette brands is because cigarette advertising was banned in 2003. There were other measures, too – plain packaging, smoking bans, explicit warnings – but banning advertising was a crucial step.

Until then, there are ways of getting help. Felix’s family signed him up to GamStop: an exclusion scheme that prevented him from gambling online, meaning he had to go and place bets in person. He still did this three or four times a day, but ‘it’s a chore to have to go to the bookies late at night’. The thing that ultimately helped him was being caught and given an ultimatum. Pay the money back. And go to Gamblers Anonymous. ‘The only hope was going somewhere where people understand what the problem is. It’s mind-blowing what I owe to that room. Now I look at it, it was a blessing that I was caught.’

And yet, now that he’s in recovery, he sees it everywhere. Most of his friends gamble. They try to change the subject when he’s around, but he knows they’re doing it. At Bristol City, too. ‘I notice more the amount of men sat around me looking at football bets with friends and not watching the game.’ He reckons it can’t be helped. ‘I can’t stop others.’

Annie Ashton is more optimistic that the tide is finally turning – and can foresee a time when football ceases to be an unending advert for the gambling industry. ‘Eventually, it will have to happen,’ she says. ‘They’re draining it as much as possible now, but as with smoking advertising, it will need to stop.’ At times, she despairs of how normalised gambling has become. But she feels that even if many people remain unaware of just how corrosive it can be, they’re fed up of it being flashed in their faces all the time. ‘People are becoming sick and tired of seeing it on telly. They’re sick and tired of seeing it at football matches. We’re being force-fed it, force-fed something we do not want. It will have to stop.’

For more information or to find support, visit gamblingwithlives.org or gamblersanonymous.org.uk