Can We Have Our Football Back?: How the premier league is ruining football and what we can do about it... by Nicholson John

Author:Nicholson, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head Publishing
Published: 2019-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

THE GAMBLING TRUTH

It wouldn’t be fair to lay the problems created by the flourishing online betting industry wholly at the door of the Premier League, but it has become the main platform for driving the growth of some of the most venal, amoral capitalist businesses which will seek to make profit out of anything, no matter how destructive. Betting found its spiritual and economic home in the Premier League and has spread its tentacles far and wide. Saying that it might ruin lives of gamblers and their friends and families will not get you a sympathetic ear. It’s all about money and if you’re vulnerable to addiction, it is even better for them because they’ll just exploit you until you have less than nothing. Hand in hand with ending the Premier League, we must uncouple gambling from the game itself.

The Premier League’s profit-first culture has set a standard and opened all the doors to them and it appears to care not one jot for the consequences. And it’s surely another reason for our existential crisis in top-flight football. Another reason we feel so queasy at the thought of another game broadcast live in between a cavalcade of enticements to place a bet. A game played by people whose shirts and grounds are covered pretty much from head to vote in betting company logos. This has just reached a new nadir with Wayne Rooney taking a role as player-coach for Derby County, wearing the number 32 on his back because his wages are in part being paid for by a betting company called 32Red. He is now a weird hybrid footballer, being employed by both a football club and a gambling organisation. What the Hell is going on? His net worth is currently estimated at $160 million. I could not have invented a better illustration of the amoral, perverted financial culture of modern football. Is it any wonder that we regular people look on at this with astonishment and increased alienation?

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Football and gambling have become so inextricably interwoven in the last 10 years that the language of gambling is now part of the language of football. Outside of the actual ads for gambling, odds-on scores and results are now routinely referred to in this context. “The bookies had them as 4/1 favourites,” someone on TV or radio will say in response to an unexpected result. TalkSport actually dispenses in-game betting odds as the match unfolds.

I’ve called it the ‘ ’ave a bang on that’ culture after the Ray Winstone-fronted adverts which used this as a tagline and it is absolutely everywhere, all the time. Sky Bet used to have “It matters more when there’s money on it” for their advertising tagline, as though football couldn’t satisfy you in itself, and you needed the additional fix to briefly thaw out your frozen soul. It always seemed a pernicious statement, speaking of dull, pointless lives, needing the adrenalin of the threat of money lost or, less likely, the glory of money won.

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