Football has a problem with gambling. And it’s significant enough that some
governing bodies are introducing new rules and bans to try to deal with it.
The problem is often seen as mostly a fan issue,
but on closer inspection there are many harrowing tales from within the game itself.
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In May 2023, Brentford forward Ivan Toney was banned for eight months for gambling
offences and diagnosed with a gambling addiction.
Toney was punished in accordance with the blanket ban the Football Association introduced in 2014,
preventing players and coaches from gambling on football worldwide.
The Premier League has also introduced new legislation. From 2026 onwards, they will ban
clubs from selling front-of-shirt sponsors to gambling companies.
But many of football’s issues occur out of sight.
Steven Caulker is a recovering gambling addict and he spoke to The Athletic about his struggle.
Caulker played for clubs including Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, Swansea and Queens Park
Rangers, and says he was “consumed” by gambling at the beginning of his career.
He was just a teenager at Spurs when he first started visiting bookmakers’
high-street outlets. Caulker even went to rehab for the first time when he was 19 through the
Sporting Chance Clinic but left after a week. “The naivety of me thought I could be cured — that
is not the case,” he says. “When I was around 22, at QPR, I lost £250,000 in one night.
“And when I was at Liverpool… I would drink to forget my gambling woes and when I was
drunk I would gamble and blackout. Caulker says card games on team
buses at away matches “rarely get out of control” and it is the “boys who gamble
in secret that are the heavy hitters”. Scott Davies started his career in nearby
Reading’s academy and played for Crawley Town and Oxford United too. The now 35-year-old estimates
he lost around £250,000, almost his entire income over a nine-year period, plus £50,000
of his parents’ money due to gambling addiction. Davies has been clean for eight years and now also
works for EPIC Risk Management, an organisation that visits clubs and schools to educate people
about the effects of gambling-related harm. “When I was a young pro coming through at
Aldershot, every afternoon a group of around eight of us would go to the cafe, the bookmakers
and then the snooker hall,” Davies says. “We would all be betting. A lot of us were
young players living away from home — we had a lot of spare time and cash and were
hanging around with a couple of lads coming to the end of their careers.
“We were like little sheep that followed them. When I was at Yeovil,
I remember going to Ladbrokes every day for a month, getting back to my hotel
and crashing, thinking, ‘What have I done?’” Frank Nouble has played in all four of England’s
top divisions and he witnessed how dangerous gambling addictions can be at one previous club,
when a team-mate had to ask for financial help. “He was a young lad and the club had to
control his money during the month because he lost it,” Nouble says.
“A few of us older players found out and tried to help him block gambling apps on his phone. We
chipped in a bit of money and said, ‘We will be here for you, but you need to learn from
this. Next time you could have a family and people around you might not want to help’.
One professional footballer who has had a decade in the English game was prepared
to talk about players betting on matches on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships.
“You get guys who will bet on anything,” he told The Athletic.
“They use friends’ accounts or VPNs to disguise what they are doing or try to
get away with it. If that makes them invisible, then what can anyone do?
But it’s baffling because anyone who does it knows they are risking their career. It’s a
compulsion or an addiction because it’s not as if there aren’t other things to bet on.”
To outsiders, that seems like a bizarre risk to take, but footballers have a lot of dietary
and behavioural restrictions on their lives, and are left with a limited number of options
to relax and unwind. Smartphones have completely changed the way the gambling
industry operates as they allow people to bet huge amounts of money without leaving home.
Steven Caulker says gambling was his “form of escape”. Others describe
its role in alleviating boredom during long stays in hotels or interrupting the
tedium experienced during injury recovery What cannot be ignored is how prevalent
gambling sponsors are within football. Many Premier League clubs still have
gambling firms as the main sponsor on the chests of their shirts and the EFL, the three divisions
of 72 clubs below the Premier League, has a long-term partnership with SkyBet. Media outlets,
including The Athletic and Tifo Football, have gambling adverts on their content too.
“Boredom, free time, decent money coming in each week… they’re all reasons,
but don’t forget betting advertising is everywhere in football,” the player who
spoke to The Athletic anonymous says. “You’ll see players flick open apps on
their phones in the dressing room after full-time or on the coach to check other
scores. Those apps are always loaded with betting content: odds, offers, metrics,
one or two clicks to start gambling.” But it’s not the sole problem.
When Caulker was struggling with his addiction, he remembers the lack of proper advice.
Most clubs now employ psychologists and the work of companies and charities in educating
players about addiction helps too, but he still feels that things could be improved.
“Inside the clubs, much better communication is needed. Coaches need some sort of emotional
intelligence course alongside their first aid. It is not a necessity, and that’s bizarre.
‘How does (the manager) know I’ve got a problem? Has he got qualifications? Has he been trained?’.
No. As far as he is concerned, I’m just another guy who likes to bet.”