Barton could be tip of iceberg in crisis of game’s own making
ootball’s corrosive relationship with gambling is a problem hiding in plain sight. In 2013, a mere three Premier League clubs had betting companies as their shirt sponsors: Fulham, Stoke and Aston Villa.
Today, it is half the division, all of them courting firms of increasingly exotic and opaque origin. Take West Bromwich Albion, who last summer chose to consort with the lesser-known UK-K8.com, an online casino operator headquartered in China. Or Hull City, who agreed to emblazon on their tops the insignia of SportPesa, a sports betting website based in Nairobi.
The sums behind these controversial alliances are considerable. BetEast, which describes itself ambiguously as an “Asian-facing brand”, bankrolls Swansea City to the tune of £4million a year. Dafabet, from its base in the Philippines, spreads its largesse more diffusely, pumping £6million per annum into Sunderland and a further £2million into Burnley – the employers of Joey Barton, who this week admitted to placing 1,260 bets on football matches over a 10-year period, only to find himself banned from the game for 18 months.
Barton shoulders more than his share of responsibility. For a start, his published mea culpa contained a conspicuous sin of omission. “I have never placed a bet against my own team when in a position to win a game,” he said, overlooking a record that in 2006, he bet against Georgios Samaras, his then Manchester City team-mate, to be the first scorer against Fulham, despite playing in that game. Such an inconsistency militates against his argument that the length of his ban is harsh.
Some of Barton’s philosophical justifications, though, are worth hearing out. The Football Association’s decision to throw the book at him sits a touch uneasily with the fact that even it, as the arbiter of moral justice, is sponsored by Ladbrokes. The Football League? SkyBet. The Scottish Cup? William Hill. On and on it goes, a tale of craven and collective surrender to the bookies’ riches. As such, Barton’s highlighting of a clash between the FA’s rules and the game’s avaricious culture can hardly be gainsaid.
There is, of course, such a thing as free will. Gary Lineker’s shilling for Walkers Crisps ought not to mean the youngsters who watch him will grow up with sky-high cholesterol. Equally, those players who confessed to alcoholism between 1993 and 2001 did not rush to draw a correlation that the Premier League was title-sponsored in those years by Carling. And yet betting’s saturation runs far deeper.
Nobody should be under any misapprehension that the FA’s toughness towards Barton is not mere window-dressing upon a far deeper malaise. A warning was issued in February by Chris Eaton, former adviser to Fifa and Interpol, that Gambling Commission figures showing how 53 footballers had been reported for potential betting breaches represented the “tip of the iceberg”. His words need to be heeded, fast.
The FA spells out clearly enough that betting on football is outlawed, but its simultaneous embrace of the money sloshing through the gambling ether sends an ambivalent message. Four years ago, striker Cameron Jerome was fined £50,000 for breaching betting regulations. It would be apt to point out that his club Stoke were owned, as now, by Peter Coates, founder of Bet365, that their shirts carried the name of Coates’s company and even their ground, the Britannia, had been renamed the Bet365 stadium.
In this country, football has long been oblivious, too, to Eaton’s emphasis on the perils of cosying up to the south-east Asian market, gambling’s equivalent of the Wild West. In 2013, he explained: “The grey-area betting businesses, particularly out of Manila, are the biggest concern to us. It’s almost impossible to measure how they do business.”
Where do you suppose Dafabet has made its bed? Yes, Manila. Truly, betting’s exponential proliferation in football should trouble us far more deeply than it does. I asked Eaton once about the risks, and he was adamant: purely commercial relationships, without responsibility clauses to protect the interests of both parties, did not pass any ethical test. But still clubs jump into bed with the gamblers, no questions asked.
At its root, betting is anything but a seductive habit. Real-life betting shops are diagrams of unhappiness. Switch to cyberspace, however, and this sordid underbelly is miraculously airbrushed. It is as if your usual ramshackle corner-shop bookies is transformed into Caesar’s Palace. Punters of all backgrounds are enticed by the latest digital wizardry. It is a pact football has made, one that is likely to claim far more victims than Barton. It is sleepwalking into a crisis of its own making.