Paul Rouse: Bookmakers not afraid of losing their shirts
Bournemouth’s Marcus Tavernier celebrates scoring a goal for the club sponsored by an offshore gambling operation from the Philippines.
There has been much noise about the decision of the Premier League to stop gambling brands from advertising on the front of match-day jerseys from the 2026-27 season.
The presentation of this decision as evidence that English soccer is serious about grappling with the manner in which the game has been colonised by gambling is nonsense.
At best, it is a symbolic first step. In reality, it is not even close to being enough. If you want evidence that this is all one big attempt to make believe that soccer is trying to disassociate from gambling companies, remember that gambling sponsorship will still be allowed on the sleeves of jerseys and on the advertising boards that ring every pitch and stadium. And so on and on across the vast commercial expanse of modern soccer.
It is essentially an attempt to pretend to care about the lives of people who have been destroyed – and are daily being destroyed – by gambling. More than that, it is also an insult to the intelligence to imagine that people will see this as much more than mere window-dressing.
The story of the past two decades of jersey sponsorship in England is the story of the rise of the influence of betting companies. Gambling advertisements have essentially displaced alcohol and technology products, in terms of scale and dependence.
Indeed, they are now the single biggest source of revenue in terms of jersey sponsorship. Accompanying that rise, is a similar (though not as great) rise in financial institutions and financial products being represented. Among these are advertisements for investment in cryptocurrencies – another form of gambling, albeit one masquerading in a different guise.
It was the “traditional” London club Fulham that opened wide the gates to shirt sponsorship from gambling companies when they put BetFair on the famous old black-and-white jersey in 2002. Eight clubs in the Premier League currently have betting brands on their jerseys - Bournemouth, Brentford, Everton, Fulham, Leeds United, Newcastle United, Southampton and West Ham United.
It gets still worse in the lower tiers of the game in England: Some two-thirds of Championship clubs have betting sponsorships on their jerseys, and the Championship itself is actually sponsored by SkyBet.
The basic reality is that English soccer clubs are now hugely reliant on the income they receive from their “gambling partners”. It is a partnership that does not have the same importance as television money, of course, but it is linked to that exposure and is fundamental to the financing of clubs. It even matters to those clubs who are owned as playthings by countries in the Middle East.
The reliance on gambling advertising grew when the Gambling Act, 2005 allowed for the marketing of betting companies across all forms of media. What followed was an immediate and enormous expansion in gambling marketing.
This marketing expansion coincided with the growth in online gambling and the rise to ubiquity of the smartphone. Conditions could hardly have been more auspicious for betting companies to make hay.
A brilliant research study which was produced at the University of Stirling in 2020 (entitled “Examining the frequency and nature of gambling marketing in televised broadcasts of professional sporting events in the United Kingdom”) laid bare the triumph of betting companies and the central role that sports sponsorship has played in it.
The report notes that “sport sponsorship is a particularly effective form of marketing that allows brands to be associated with, and capitalise on, the emotional connections that consumers have with teams and events.” #
A prime example of how this works is that fact that examining the BBC’s ‘Match of the Day’ programme showed that viewers saw more than 250 examples of gambling marketing on the show every Saturday night.
That a programme that is so central to modern popular culture in England should be so saturated by gambling advertising (and on a television channel – BBC ONE – that does not allow for formal advertising slots) demonstrates with absolute clarity the triumph of the strategic advertising of gambling companies and the extent to which soccer is now a vehicle for their pursuit of profit.
As the University of Stirling report stated: “Research suggests that exposure to gambling sports sponsorship is associated with a variety of consumer reactions and outcomes. These include increasing knowledge of gambling brands, normalising gambling as an everyday activity, encouraging feelings of greater control over betting outcomes, and stimulating sign-up with more than one betting provider.”
More precisely, “exposure to such marketing activities may encourage gambling among problem and recovering problem gamblers” and “many of the gambling products that are advertised during live football are for complex events that may mislead consumers about the likelihood of winning, resulting in high profit margins for the bookmakers.” In the twelve months before March 2022, soccer as the sport in the United Kingdom which had the highest level of betting activity (only horse racing came remotely close). It brought in more than £1bn in revenue for gambling companies.
That is achieved only be hoovering money from the pockets of people – many of those people are emphatically not in a position to lose that money.
But that only tells a small part of the story. The global reach of English soccer with its vast armies of supporters identifying with particular clubs allows access to the gambling markets of Asia and beyond. These too are exceptionally lucrative.
It reveals much that Bournemouth (Dafabet) and Newcastle (Fun88), are sponsored by offshore gambling operators from the Philippines.
A final point: the Premier League only agreed to these changes after discussions with the British government. That Tory government is so inept, so craven, so devoid of the basic standards of human decency that it is caught in a world of gestures and signalling. Devoid of a moral compass, it is left only to pretend to do what is right.
In this instance, it has obviously struck a deal with the Premier League to get them to remove gambling sponsorship from its jerseys in advance of a government paper which is reviewing the Gambling At, 2005.
It is plain now that the initiatives – if any – that will flow from that paper will be light-touch and will centre on pleading that gambling companies “act responsibly”. There will be a few minor tweaks, but nothing substantial.
The thing is, we know that gambling sponsorship works – why else would companies spend so much money buying brand space in the public arena if it didn’t work? And for it to work, brings ruin to many families.
It is a stain on soccer that it cares so little about its public.
