Football Index, the game’s ‘stock market’, has licence suspended
The Gambling Commission has suspended the operating licence of Football Index, the self-styled “stock market of football”, a few hours after the beleaguered betting company announced on Thursday that it had suspended “trading” on its platform.
The Gambling Commission said in a statement on Friday morning that the operating licence of BetIndex Ltd, the Jersey-based parent company of Football Index, had been suspended following “an ongoing section 116 review into the operator, as we had concerns activities may have been carried out in purported reliance on the licence, but not in accordance with a condition of the licence, and that Football Index may not be suitable to carry on with licensed activities.”
The statement added: “We have made it clear to the operator that as the investigation progresses, we expect it to focus on treating consumers fairly and keeping them fully informed of any developments which impact them.”
For the moment, Football Index’s licence has been suspended rather than revoked pending the outcome of the Gambling Commission’s investigation. After a series of crashes in the overall value of its market since September 2020, however, most recently after an 80% cut in the “dividends” paid out when players performed well, it is difficult to see any way it can survive.
Thousands of account holders with
Football Index, who have staked tens of millions with the firm to buy what it described as “shares” in leading footballers, will now fear that their last hope of retrieving any money trapped in the platform has vanished.
It could be weeks or months before the scale of losses in Football Index becomes clear, but it seems certain to be the biggest failure that Britain’s regulated gambling industry has seen.
Its model – seen by some customers as “safer” than betting with a traditional bookmaker – encouraged users to deposit and gamble large sums and then wait for dividend returns, in the expectation that they could also retrieve funds by selling their “shares” to other users should they so wish.
The market’s liquidity evaporated during recent collapses, however, leaving money trapped in the market unless users accepted huge losses on their stakes. It now seems almost certain that all outstanding stakes - by one estimate, at least £60m – will be lost.
The two Championship clubs, Nottingham Forest and Queens Park Rangers, who had Football Index as their shirt sponsors revealed on Friday that they were dropping the logo with immediate effect.