Only one man to blame for this debacle... and it’s not a bookie
IN Britain’s housing schemes, betting is a rite of passage. A fast track to adulthood. It starts on Grand National day with a pound coin and a scan of the racing pages. A boy’s first winner in the National (Rubstic in 1979, since you ask) is a thrilling business.
And it’s fair to ask. Where’s the harm in that?
The answer usually comes when it’s too late to turn back time.
When the family housekeeping is frittered away on one last bet to break a losing streak.
Or a wealthy, famous footballer lands himself an 18-month ban for breaching FA gambling rules.
It’s hard to muster much sympathy for Joey Barton.
In a troubled, violent, often unpleasant career, this god-awful Rangers mistake contrives to be his own worst enemy.
And yet. In an otherwise self-pitying statement, he makes some salient points.
Some of us grew up spending Saturday lunchtimes standing outside smoky, airless betting shops. It’s easy for kids to get sucked in.
Some come of age, step inside and join the party. Others see horses and greyhounds as a mug’s game and find another vice.
For Joey Barton, an addictive personality made that an easy choice. Problem gambling is an illness. If the midfielder needs help, then he should use the next 18 months doing the needful.
And if there’s a treatment available for extreme stupidity, he should try that as well.
Because Barton might be right to suggest footballers are victims of their upbringing.
But he placed bets against his own team. And that never looks good, however you paint it.
He can stress — repeatedly — that he only gambled on games he didn’t actually play in.
That betting a fiver on team-mate Georgios Samaras being unable to strike a cow’s backside with a banjo is hardly a smoking gun.
No one is suggesting he actually fixed football matches — least of all the committee who consigned him to an early retirement. But there is something dubious and whiffy about a player betting against his own team in any circumstance. Or placing 1,300 bets when he knows that even placing one breaks the rules.
‘If the FA is truly serious about tackling the culture of gambling in football,’ says our flawed friend, ‘it needs to look at its own dependence on the gambling companies, their role in football and in sports broadcasting, rather than just blaming the players who place a bet.’
As straw-man arguments go, this is a corker.
You get the impression sometimes that heartless bookies are physically dragging football players, kicking and screaming, into their premises. Forcing them to download betting apps on their smartphones. They’re not.
Top players have free time and enormous wages. But they earn fat pay packets in the first place because betting firms choose to pump their money into the coffers of top football clubs. The day our Joey pitched up at Burnley to sign a £20,000-a-week contract, the malign influence of shirt sponsors Dafabet on vulnerable footballers didn’t seem so important.
For Barton and his fellow pros to bleat about tie-ups between gambling and football is a bit rich.
Listen, we all wish football could find more fragrant commercial partners to team up with. But there’s no ambiguity in the football authorities accepting sponsorship from betting firms while banning players from gambling. A tie-up between The Famous Grouse and the SRU doesn’t give Stuart Hogg a free pass to sink a bottle of whisky before staggering out at Murrayfield. Why should Bet365 cop the flak for Joey Barton?
Extend that logic and Guinness and Bacardi should call the lawyers if Barton ever wraps his car round a lamppost after a night on the tiles.
You almost admire the chutzpah of the man who breaks the rules in spectacular fashion then blames the bookies. But, let’s be honest, Ladbrokes sponsor leagues like the SPFL because football remains a magnet for mug punters with too much money and too little sense. Guys just like Barton.
Bottom lip trembling, he concludes by saying: ‘Throughout my career I am someone who has made mistakes and owned up to those mistakes and tried to learn.’
If stubbing out a cigar in the face of a young team-mate is a ‘mistake’ then, yes, he’s made a few. Yet the most recent training-ground bust-up at Rangers suggests he hasn’t learned much at all.
Burnley is merely the latest in a catalogue of wasted chances. There’s one man to blame here and it’s not William Hill.