Is Britain the future of American sports betting?
‘‘ Britain’s 65 million inhabitants wagered nearly $20 billion US for the year that ended in March 2017.
LONDON — So now that the United States Supreme Court has cleared the way for gambling on sports, what does a world with legalized sports betting look like?
To find an answer to that question, one only has to gaze across the Atlantic Ocean, to Britain and other European countries, where gambling is as much a part of the sports culture as wearing the home team’s jersey to the game.
Gambling here is, in a word, ubiquitous, and the only limit for bettors is their imagination. Bettors place wagers before the game and during it. They wager on who will score the next goal, or how many goals will be scored in the final 10 minutes or in stoppage time.
Oddsmakers offer a dizzying array of betting permutations. If that is not enough, they even offer gamblers the chance to design their own bet. A yellow card in the second half injury time, followed by a red card and a disallowed goal? They will give you a line on that.
“Tweet us. We can price up your bet in 15 minutes,” said Ciaran O’Brien, a spokesperson for William Hill.
He said it is not unusual for there to be 500 betting lines on a single game.
Britain’s 65 million inhabitants wagered nearly $20 billion US for the year that ended in March 2017, according to a report from the country’s gambling commission. The United States, however, has a far more diverse sports market, with five major professional sports leagues, plus college sports.
In Britain, where even Queen Elizabeth is known to “fancy a flutter,” gambling’s relationship with sports is firmly entrenched: Nine of the 20 soccer teams playing in the Premier League have names of gambling companies emblazoned on their jersey fronts — companies based as far away as Macau and the Philippines. Inside the stadium, betting odds crawl across advertising boards. Almost every Premier League soccer team has an official betting partner, which in some cases is a multimilliondollar relationship that includes betting booths inside the stadium and dedicated websites.
Betting advertisements on television are so prevalent that they frequently outnumber those for beer and pizza companies on match days. British actor Ray Winstone is probably more well known today for his role in promoting in-game betting for Bet365 — one of the world’s largest online betting companies — than for the hard men and gangsters he’s played on screens large and small.
At halftime of major televised games, Winstone, dressed in a suit and open collared shirt, stares straight into the camera lens, and urges punters in his Cockney accent to “have a bang on that,” as behind him live odds for the game in question are beamed into homes across the country. Thanks to the availability of high-speed Wi-Fi and scores of smartphone applications dedicated to gambling, sports fans can do that and much more.
SkyBet is the title sponsor for the three divisions of English soccer below the Premier
League, known as the SkyBet Championship, SkyBet League One and SkyBet League Two.
Wagering, of course, is not limited to sports. Even the recent birth of the Queen’s latest great-grandchild presented an opportunity.
“It’s the most mature market in the world,” said Mark Locke, chief executive of Genius Sports, a data provider to betting companies and sports leagues. “Gambling is part of the culture.”
The availability and ease of betting in the era of the internet has led to a recent government crackdown after a rise in compulsive gambling. Some of Winstone’s Bet365 commercials have been taken off the airwaves. An advertising watchdog last month began enforcing measures to restrict commercials “that create an inappropriate sense of urgency, such as those calling on participants to place immediate bets during live events.”
During the past decade, the gambling websites and smartphone applications have become ever more sophisticated. Data companies like Genius and market leader Sportradar, which has relationships with the NBA and NFL, have increased in size, allowing bookmakers to offer more bets on more sports.
That relationship came into harsh focus recently after an independent review of integrity in tennis.
Among the findings, published last month, was the claim that lower levels of the game were awash with a “tsunami” of corruption.
And the British Treasury is pushing to reduce the maximum bet on fixed odds betting terminals from about $140 every 20 seconds to around $3.
The powerful betting lobby has been pushing back, attempting to protect the higher limit. In 2016 these machines — dubbed “the crack cocaine of gambling” — generated $2.5 billion.