Don’t gamble with the game’s future

THE DISEMBODIED head of Ray Winstone popped up as usual at around 9pm on Monday night.

“The latest live odds are coming up on your screen now,” said the gravel-voiced star at half-time in the Premier League game between Swansea and Hull.

Winstone was there to tempt punters for whom the spectacle at the Liberty Stadium wasn’t quite enthralling enough on its own.

Football and betting are cosy bedfellows these days. Three Premier League teams have betting firms as shirt sponsors. Sky Bet is title sponsor of the Football League. Most professional clubs, Athletic included, have an ‘official betting partner’.

While it used to be a covert activity, conducted in dank shops without windows, nowadays everyone who watches live games is shown next-goal odds and tricky cash-out dilemmas.

Last year, research from broadcast regulator Ofcom showed there had been 1.39million gambling advertising spots on TV - a nine-fold increase in six years.

Sports betting accounted for 6.6-per-cent of that total in 2012 — around 91,000 televised adverts over the year, or almost 250 a day.

Whether this is a problem depends on your perspective. Most people who have a bet are able to do so with control. But some within football have found gambling has the potential to ruin lives.

Former Manchester United winger Keith Gillespie recounted in his autobiography how his addiction to gambling cost him an estimated £7m. Ex-Ipswich striker Michael Chopra lost £2m to betting, former Hearts player Kevin Twaddle £1m and Dietmar Hamann said he once lost £288,000 on a single bet. No doubt there are many other similar, unpublicised cases.

Sporting Chance chief executive Colin Bland said recently that players are taking out pay-day loans to fund their gambling addictions. Seventy-per-cent of addiction referrals to the charity are gambling-related. Even PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor reportedly amassed a personal debt of over £100,000 to a bookmaker.

With the allegations of the past few weeks in mind, football must do much more to deal with the darker side of its highly lucrative gambling industry.