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Game, Set, Match – The Unhappy Marriage Of Football And Gambling 

The debate has raged on ever since the dissolution of the old First Division and the subsequent inception of the Premier League: do Premiership footballers earn too much? The lucrative deal struck by the League with Sky Sports for exclusive screening rights of matches meant that money poured into the sport, catapulting top footballers into top earners. It is no surprise, then, that the millionaire playboys at the top of their game prefer to spend their time in the casinos and the Caribbean rather than sitting at home playing free online bingo. However, the party does not always stop when it should. 

In 2008 a footballer admitted accepting a bribe of £50,000 to help throw a match to cover a debt that he racked up with a bookmaker. The former Premiership player – who has remained anonymous due to his treatment through the Sporting Chance clinic, itself established by former Arsenal defender Tony Adams in 2000 after his recovery from alcohol addiction – agreed to actively earn himself a red card whilst also persuading three other team mates to pick up a yellow each in the same game. 

This incident is striking inasmuch as it has far-reaching implications as England's top flight has rarely been rocked by match-fixing scandals. The most notable case came in the 1960s when former Everton player Jimmy Gauld organised a betting ring, and included a scam whereby three Sheffield Wednesday footballers bet against their team winning a match against Ipswich Town. The players were caught, convicted and banned from football for life in an attempt by the football association to make an example of such activities. 

In actual fact, in the UK these incidents are isolated to individuals making the choice to throw matches due to personal addiction rather than because of pressure from large-scale criminal syndicates or institutional corruption as in the recent cases of Italy, Germany and Poland. 

Like any other member of the population, footballers are permitted to bet as long as it is neither on any match in which they are playing nor any match upon which they could wield an influence. And bet they do. In 2000, over a third of Premier League footballers admitted to betting on football. Writing in his column in The Observer in 2007 David James conceded that gambling is rife amongst footballers, saying, “Premiership footballers gamble what to many people appear to be huge sums of money”. James goes on to recount his “infamous gambling days” at Liverpool, where he would go to the races with Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler who owned some horses - “'some horse' and 'another horse' were two of them”.  

James does, however, claim that it is wrong to condemn footballers for gambling money they can “afford to spend”, and there is certainly some credence to this claim. Frank Lampard, for example, is reportedly paid £150,000 every single week, nearly the average annual salary of a player in the Championship, over twice as much as a player earns yearly in League One and surpassing three times as much as the annual salary of a player in League Two. With such lottery-size bingo jackpots entering their accounts every week, it is no real surprise that Premiership footballers flitter away large sums on horses, cards and cars. The problem would arise should they spend more than they earn or, as in the case of the anonymous player from Sporting Chance, doubling what they bet to cover their losses. After all, stars – just like the average Joe – should take care to gamble responsibly.

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