Uniform limitation does not hide English football addiction to betting – 04/22/2023 – Sport

As Premier League football clubs prepare to scrap bookmaker branding from the front of their shirts, activists are warning that the English game’s deep ties to the betting industry remain ingrained.

In response to pressure from the UK government and activists, the Premier League, the highest level of English football, moved to distance itself from the industry for the first time last week.

The league announced it would end sponsorship of shirt-front betting in the 2026/27 season, in a symbolically important move.

Around £60m (£120m) in annual revenue is at stake for the eight clubs affected by the ban, who are now faced with the challenge of replacing that revenue with other sponsorship deals amid an uncertain economic outlook.

But the reluctance of football authorities to respond to pleas from advocates of safer betting, to cut ties with betting sponsors altogether, exposes the sector’s degree of financial dependency, particularly in the lower leagues.

A senior football executive called the move a “political mess” that “makes no logical sense” because sponsorship of betting continues on shirt sleeves and on pitch-side advertising hoardings.

“The government felt it had to do something to keep the hawks at bay.”

Andrea Sartori, founder of sports data company Football Benchmark, said the Premier League was trying “to paint a picture of social responsibility because excessive betting is bad for society, but […] they don’t want to give up the income that comes from this industry”.

Football offers the betting industry a way to convince young people, the most dedicated punters and most likely to develop addiction, to channel their interest in the sport through betting.

In the year to March 2022, football was ranked as the sport with the most betting activity in the UK, generating £1.1 billion (R$ 6.9 billion) in gross gaming revenue for operators, according to the Gambling Commission, the industry watchdog.

The Premier League’s global fan base has attracted foreign companies such as Philippine offshore gaming operators Dafabet and Fun88, which sponsor teams Bournemouth and Newcastle respectively, aiming to reach international audiences as well as the UK domestic fan base. .

It’s a bond that dates back to 2002, a decade after the launch of the Premier League, when Fulham became the first English football club to sign a sponsorship deal with betting platform Betfair.

A 2020 University of Stirling study, which analyzed five major football matches, including Premier League games, found that a betting sponsor was cited every 21 seconds during a typical TV broadcast.

Despite the ban on front-of-shirt sponsorship, the gaming industry remains entrenched in English football at all levels. There is no way to adopt the voluntary Premier League ban in the lower leagues, several of which are sponsored by SkyBet, which is now owned by Flutter, the world’s biggest betting group.

Clubs in the English Football League (LIF), which run the three divisions below the first, are more reliant on sponsorship money from betting as their income from media rights is lower than that of Premier League clubs. Even some of the worst-performing top-flight clubs can earn over £100m (£25m) a year from TV rights.

LIF has been sponsored by Sky Bet since 2013, with half a dozen teams in the Sky Bet Championship (the second tier of the Premier League, second only to the Premier League) carrying betting marks on the front of their shirts. LIF and its clubs earn around £40m (£15m) of revenue a year from betting deals.

Peter Shilton, a former England goalkeeper who campaigned against sponsorship of sports betting after overcoming a gambling addiction, said he would like to see LIF opt out of renewing his contract with Sky Bet when it expires at the end of next season.

“Football is a great game and it’s a family game, but it’s saturated by betting companies,” he said. “It’s time to contain them as it was with cigarette ads in Formula 1.”

LIF declined to comment on the Sky Bet deal. The organization argued that betting operators should make a financial contribution to clubs because of the significant profit they generate from competitions.

In his 15-year football career, Wycombe Wanderers midfielder David Wheeler has never played a game in which the ball or his kit was not adorned with a betting company’s logo.

Gambling sponsors “are all over the place,” Wheeler said. Once the change is implemented, “they will be almost everywhere, but not on some clubs’ shirts”. “I have a man of the match medal that says ‘Sky Bet’. It gets in the way a little bit,” she added. SkyBet owner Flutter declined to comment.

“At the end of the day, there isn’t a queue of other sectors willing to pay the football league money that is going to go all the way to Accrington Stanley,” said one game executive, referring to a small Lancashire club in the LIF. “There isn’t an oat latte company that’s ready to come on the scene.”

The LIF had previously cited commissioned research which found there was “no evidence” that seeing sponsorship of bets is associated with increased betting among fans.

The crackdown on Premier League betting sponsorship comes as cryptocurrency and digital asset groups move forward with new partnerships with football clubs.

Vaughan Lewis, director of strategy at betting group 888, sponsor of Cardiff City’s LIF Championship training kit, said the involvement of cryptocurrencies in football is akin to “simple unregulated betting”.

“Gambling gets all the flak, but crypto is also financially risky,” said Alex Burmaster, co-founder of sponsorship intelligence firm Caytoo.

“You would assume betting companies will try to make the most of it while they can,” said Burmaster. “They wouldn’t keep spending that money if it didn’t work.”