Greedy bookies love a mug punter... is that why they kept taking Barton’s bets?
Leon osman was, understandably, perplexed. How did bookmakers allow Joey Barton to bet for 10 years, using his real name and his home address? It does seem rather strange. osman explained that when he stopped playing for everton last year, he opened an online betting account. It had been running for six weeks when it was suddenly suspended.
‘I had to phone up and explain to them that I was no longer playing football or associated with everton,’ he said. ‘They looked me through and released my account. You’re not telling me that in 10 years they’ve not noticed Joey Barton’s betting on football.’
Badly, a cynic might add. Barton bet on football badly. Between march 2006 and may 2016, he laid out roughly £200,000 across 1,200 bets and ended up around £17,000 down.
so what changed? maybe Betfair feared that Barton, coming to the end of his career, with a penchant for media revelation and a book to sell, might go rogue and admit his addiction. That would certainly look bad on them, for not intervening earlier. It does not figure that for a decade they were happy to take his bets, only to then turn him in.
as for osman (below), the explanation may be simpler. Perhaps he was winning. It’s the winning accounts bookmakers need to get off the ledger.
Take the case of one gambler currently before the Independent Betting adjudication service. Let’s call her Punter a. she opened a Bet365 account on april 16, 2016 and the following day deposited £30,000 in it. she almost immediately lost £23,000 on a series of poor bets.
Bet365 sent her an email saying the size of her maximum bet had been increased. Then her luck changed. she turned the remaining £7,000 into £54,000. at which point another email arrived, saying her maximum bet was now £ 1. This, Bet365 explained, was a ‘trading decision’.
she asked for her balance to be transferred back to her debit card. nothing happened. after a series of requests, and still no action, she complained to the IBas. It opened the case in november, with a decision expected this month.
But there’s more. a year to the day after the £54,000 was frozen, Punter a received notification that as her account had been dormant for a year it was now subject to a monthly ‘administration fee’ of five per cent. The only way to avoid a charge of £2,700 around mid-may would be to withdraw the balance; except Bet365 won’t let her do that.
Bet365 have admitted they acted in error by trying to levy a charge while the IBas investigation was ongoing. also, they are not disputing that the account existed, the nature of the bets, or the results of the races.
maybe they think Punter a is a front, although she has produced bank statements to confirm that her funds were acquired from a legitimate source. The case continues.
Back to osman. What happened to his account is called a KYC ruling. Know Your Customer. Introduced as a means of combating moneylaundering, KYC compels a bank or other financial institution to chart customer identity and transactional behaviour and to match names against lists of known parties.
osman’s experience suggests bookmakers carry details, or at least knowledge, of footballers and others who are not allowed to bet. That Barton slipped through this net 1,200 times is surprising at least.
Yet, increasingly, bookmakers know their customers in other ways, too. They know what appeals to youth; they know how to suck them in; they make betting an appealing lifestyle choice.
That’s the premise of the Ladbrokes Life promotion: all laughter, horseplay, dancing, male bonding, pretty girls and big nights out on all that lovely loot they wave about.
They are the dreamers, the warriors, the havea-go-heroes. and nobody is ever shacked up in a high street bookies with a couple of potless old men for company desperately trying to punt a bumper at Hereford, when it’s a beautiful spring afternoon outside.
nobody ever goes skint, or gets addicted. They just have. a bang. on that. as Ray Winstone tells us on behalf of Bet365.
except Punter a had a proper bang, and now Bet365 don’t want to take so much as one pound and a penny of her money, in case they lose. not very warrior-like, is it? not very heroic.
mugs and students are the target audience. Glorified kids who are never going to test them by sticking 30 grand into an account and then gambling it in a way that is perhaps informed and, provided the client can afford it, responsible.
some of Barton’s bets were pathetic. Loose change for a professional footballer. Yet it adds up, as it does for other fun or casual gamblers. The estimate is that £12.6 billion went down the tubes on losing bets in Britain last year; and 48 per cent of those questioned by the Gambling Commission said they had placed a bet at least once in the previous month.
The culture is impossible to avoid now. The Premier League may feel smug about not having a gambling partner like the Football association — understandably accused of hypocrisy for banning Barton while cosying up to Ladbrokes — but they allow every broadcast of their games to be overwhelmed by gambling promotions before, after and during.
The nFL, by contrast, insist that no commercials for bookmakers are shown around their programming. They do not let their sport be used as gambling’s vehicle. The Premier League may not have a partner, but they have a lot of flames.
Did Barton deserve his 18-month ban? It is hard to argue against it. He had a warning letter from the Fa three years ago and carried on gambling. He knew what he was doing.
Yet, surely, so did the company taking his bets. They knew just what they had in a mug called Joseph Barton. Would they have been so relaxed had he been winning?