It would be seriously hypocritical of me, having condemned much of the Premier League including my team of choice Liverpool for sucking up to gambling companies, to not condemn Bristol Rovers for doing the same. In signing up to Football Index as the new shirt sponsor, the club endorses the principle of encouraging supporters to lose money and potentially lots of it. Whether it’s Bet Victor at Liverpool, Bet 188 at my rugby league club of choice Wigan Warriors or Football Index at the Gas, it’s just wrong.
I have never known so much gambling in my life. Large numbers of young people bet on line and occasionally at the bookies and many of them appear on social networks to show you when they have won and how much. Few tell you when they have lost because there would be no space for anything else on Facebook.
Watch any sporting event on telly and you will receive a deluge of betting ads, encouraging you to bet from the comfort of your armchair on your mobile phone. It’s an easy way to gamble and it’s an easy way to lose, too.
Let us be quite clear about this: whatever people say about their gambling, in the end they lose. It might not be very much – say a tenner a week, so ‘only’ £520 a year – and they will almost certainly tell you how much they love it, which they probably do. Perhaps it’s because I am so tight with my money that I loathe the idea of handing over my hard-earned in the hope that I am lucky enough to win. The odds against me winning are significant. That’s why there is no such thing as a poor bookmaker.
And it’s oh so glamorous. There is always a group of smart, casually dressed smiling young men having a great time but that’s a million miles away from the cold reality of gambling, AKA losing money.
Football in particular is a sport in which there are role models, so why taint the brand with something as undesirable as gambling? All sporting bodies and clubs who accept money from gambling companies play a role, unwittingly or otherwise, in encouraging people to gamble. We live in a free country so gambling is not banned, nor am I saying it should be. But to willingly associate oneself with something so utterly antisocial and quite possibly damaging suggests skewed principles and morals to me.
The betting companies’s strapline is “when the fun stops, stop”. But when the fun stops, it’s too late. The damage is being done, has been done. Gambling is for losers and nothing can alter that.
