Felix*, 24, can't remember when he ' first bet on football, but he reckons he was between eight and 10 years old.

‘My dad would go into the bookies and I’d be sat in the van,’ he says. ‘He’d place his bets, then bring out a slip for me to fill in the teams.’

At the time, it seemed like a bit of low-stakes father-son bonding: £2 on the first scorer and result, a bit like how some parents let their kids pick the lottery numbers. He had his first big win in 2012 when Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-1 in the FA Cup final, with Didier Drogba getting on the score sheet. That earned Felix a new pair of football boots.

And as a boy, he was obsessed. ‘I lived football. It’s been my whole life, really,’ he says. He played for his school team. He and his grandad had season tickets at Bristol City. He watched every game he could on TV, played

Fifa all the time and then, at 15, got into Fantasy Football and started studying the form of every obscure Premier League player. It was a natural progression to the bookies at 17 with fake IDs. ‘We rarely got questioned.’

It all became more serious when Felix reached 18, the age at which a person can place their first legal bet. He was now earning more than just pocket money. He had an online bank account and a smartphone. Gambling ceased to be something that he did with friends on Saturdays and became something he did on his own, all the time.

‘I’d be studying the form on a Friday night. Hoping to win the

Friday night games to pay for the Saturdays. Gamble on the early kick-offs. Then the three o’clocks, the evening games.’ He would still go to Bristol City with his grandad, but all his attention would be on his phone. ‘You end up not really supporting your own team. You’re supporting your five teams on the accumulator. I didn’t really care if City won or not.’

When he was forced to stop last year – miserable, anxious, suicidal, with £35,000 of debt, including £20,000 stolen from his employer over time – he didn’t even care if he was winning or losing any more. ‘It was about the cycle, the dopamine, the next bet,’ he says.

High Stakes

Britain’s £15.1bn gambling industry and its well-funded lobbying operation would like you to believe that the problem lies with Felix. Felix certainly isn’t looking to blame anyone else. ‘It’s my doing,’ he says. ‘It spiralled out of control through me and no one else.’ Still, the lax security checks at the bookies, the gambling adverts at the grounds, on TV, within computer games, all the WhatsApp bet chat among his friends – none of this can have helped.

And the fact that there could be as many as

1.4 million people with gambling addictions in the UK, according to GambleAware – and that, according to Public Health England, someone in England kills themselves every day due to gambling – suggests that it’s not just Felix’s problem. It suggests Britain has a gambling problem. And once you begin looking at the influence of gambling on our national game, it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins.

For seven Premier League clubs (Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brentford, Burnley, Everton, Fulham and West Ham), their primary shirt sponsor is a gambling company – but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers at Bristol University counted 6,996 separate pro-gambling messages during a weekend of Premier League action. The league below is literally called the SkyBet Championship. You can’t even escape the messaging on radio: on TalkSport, commentators are paid to offer live in-play betting odds.

This is an unbelievably lucrative business: Bet365, founded in Stoke in 2000, is the world’s largest online betting company and its CEO,

Denise Coates, earned £221 million last year. You can read all about her £90 million house and two helicopters online. It’s impossible to calculate just how much of her salary is paid for by at-risk customers. But according to statistics from the National Centre for Social Research, 86% of gross online gambling profits come from just 5% of users, while the Gambling Commission reports that 35% of people with a gambling disorder receive daily incentives to gamble.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the industry itself disputes many of the figures relating to harm, pointing to difficulties in collecting accurate self-reported data (Bet365 didn’t respond to a request for comment). However, consultant psychologist Mark Gaskell, who runs the NHS’s Northern Gambling Service, is in no doubt about the scale of the problem. ‘This is not about a minority of so-called flawed individuals,’ he says. ‘The gambling industry is targeting the population en masse and appealing to universal decision-making and biases and susceptibility.’

Dr Gaskell is quick to stress that he’s not against gambling in itself. ‘Gambling could be something that’s done recreationally for a bit of fun.’ But the UK did not create a world-beating gambling industry on the back of a few fans betting on their teams. ‘This industry isn’t interested in recreational gamblers. They want to move you to the most addictive products… and our laws and regulations are not protecting children and they’re not protecting the young men who are experiencing the most harm.’

Dr Gaskell set up his first clinic for gambling addicts in Leeds in 2019. He was struck by how many of the men who turned up were wearing football shirts. And how many of those shirts were sponsored by gambling companies.

‘There’s a pandemic,’ says James, 51, a Manchester City fan and recovering addict, who estimates he has gambled over half a million pounds in his lifetime (including his mother’s £90,000 mortgage). He can speak at length about the guilt; the lies; the resentments; the long, hard road to recovery. He credits Gamblers Anonymous with saving his life. But he’s more worried about the younger men he’s seeing. ‘There are thousands of kids who are in this scenario because of football betting, believe me, and they cannot get away from it. It’s in their head. It never stops.’

Changing The Game

The mildly encouraging news is that after years of campaigns and warnings, Britain is slowly acknowledging that, yes, we do have a gambling problem – the crucial first step in actually doing something about it. Last year, the government published a long-delayed review of gambling laws in belated acknowledgement that the industry has mutated out of all recognition in the online era.