Bookies hit the mother of all mother lodes

Declan Lynch’s Diary

SO Paddy has cracked America. Last week Paddy Power, now known as Flutter Entertainment after its merger with Betfair, agreed another merger with their Canadian rivals, the Stars Group, which is the owner of Poker Stars — all of which is very big indeed, creating the world’s biggest online betting group. After this latest consolidation, the new entity has a stock market value of £11bn. I told you they were good. I told you there could never be enough money in the world for these guys, but that they’re going to keep looking for it anyway, inspired by the knowledge that this business they are in — online gambling — is one of the greatest moneyprinting operations in human history. And now they’ve cracked America.

Here in the Old World, there is a growing awareness of the dark sides of online gambling, which involve everything from the encouragement of addiction to the orgies of advertising aimed at young men in particular, to the issue of money-laundering, to claims of match-fixing in the League of Ireland and many other leagues.

And those who try to do something about it can seem like bomb-disposal experts who are arriving on the scene long after the explosion has already taken place.

Now, dear God, there’s America, which offers not only markets of unimaginable magnitude, but a sense of a clean slate, as it were — gambling in America has always had a weird kind of subterranean position in terms of the old legalities, probably because in the 20th century, in the unwritten social contract which governs these things, gambling was essentially given over to the gangsters.

But these arrangements are shifting, what with organised crime now front and centre at the heart of mainstream politics, while gambling is starting to go legit — the legislation brought in last year largely sweeps away the peculiarities of the old system, allowing Americans to bet on sports freely, just like everyone else in the universe.

And look, here comes Paddy.

Paddy Power and its associates are now about to make a big difference to the culture of American sports and, indeed, to the culture of America in general. And of course to their own culture, which has flourished in a regulatory environment akin to that of a frontier town in the old West — the land to which they are now returning, as the song says, with gold in great store.

Immediately they will be loved by sporting bodies who will find their games will benefit from the bigger audiences consisting of online punters — golf, for example, is a game mainly watched by a diminishing number of “conservative” white men, but with the arrival of a multitude of online punters, that will change for the better.

And for the worse, of course — I refer you again to our old friends the enabling of addiction and the corruption of sports, which takes so many forms they’re still trying to compile a manageable list.

The frenzy of acquisition will be cranked up again, with many sports effectively being “owned” by the bookies, so that your Super Bowl might one day become a contest between a franchise which has “Paddy” as its “betting partner” — indeed both franchises could be partnering with “Paddy”, making it a Paddy-playsPaddy event.

Not that the bookies have had an entirely untroubled ride to glory — for every 500,000 hours of advertising and promotion there have been perhaps five articles (mostly in this paper) and maybe five TV documentaries which discover terrible things about online gambling that were totally obvious

back in 2006 or thereabouts.

There can only be one result there — and yet by a miracle of timing, as the bookies celebrate the taking of the United States, next Wednesday on TG4 there’s a documentary about Tony O’Reilly, or ‘Tony 10”.

Having written the book of that title with Tony, I was interviewed for this programme in the Finne series, which will give a sense of what may be coming to the USA.

Tony was enabled in his gambling addiction by Paddy Power, who entertained him at great sporting events as it was taking enormous bets from him — eventually he would steal approximately €1.75m from his employer, An Post. And he would go to jail.

Paddy Power contributed this to the book: “We don’t discuss the details of individual customer accounts, past or present, but we are continually evolving our responsible gambling procedures and improving our interaction with customers who display signs of harm. There are, naturally, positive developments in our approach now from the time of this case.”

Not positive enough it seems for the UK’s Gambling Commission, which last October fined Paddy Power Betfair £2.2m (€2.46m) for “a raft of failings” including some not dissimilar to those which were apparent in the Tony 10 case — there is as yet no Irish Gambling Commission, so it’s a good job there’s no urgency about any of this.

All the urgency has been coming from the other side, from the betting corporations who struck the mother lode with the discovery of online gambling, and who are about to strike the mother of all mother lodes — America.

‘By a miracle of timing, next Wednesday on TG4 there’s a documentary about Tony 10’