On January 20, all eyes were on Brentford’s Ivan Toney as he took to the pitch against Nottingham Forest. But as he helped his team to a crucial 3-2 victory, Toney’s 19th-minute equaliser, in which he controversially moved the ball before his free kick, wasn’t the only talking point. This was his first professional football game in eight months following his suspension and fining for violating the Football Association’s rules on betting, in which the striker admitted to 232 breaches. But while this scandal has been well documented in the press, Toney is certainly not the only footballer who has gotten in trouble for breaking betting rules, and his ban has shone a light on the deeper problem of gambling in football.
In October 2023, Italian midfielder Sandro Tonali was handed a ten-month ban from his country’s football federation for alleged breach of betting, a huge blow to Newcastle United, who had signed him only a few months earlier. In 2019, Kieran Trippier was handed a much shorter ban and fined £70,000 after the FA charged him with revealing transfer information used for betting by a friend, which Trippier denied knowing. Even short-term bans for players can be frustrating for fans, and one might wonder why these athletes, playing at the highest level of the game and collecting yearly salaries in the seven-figure range, are putting their careers on the line and their teams in jeopardy. But for many athletes and 1.4 million people in the UK (according to charity The Big Step), gambling is an addiction.
Toney and Tonali have both been diagnosed with gambling addictions, and Manchester United and England legend Wayne Rooney has spoken of his own struggles in a video with Red32, stating gambling started as a way to “fill the time” when away from home but quickly “sucks you in”. They are just a few of the many professional athletes who have been affected.
As many people have pointed out, it’s hardly surprising that gambling addiction is such a problem in elite sports, specifically football. With major betting companies paying millions of pounds in sponsorship deals to have their logos adorning shirts, like Toney’s own Brentford, the game has become saturated by gambling culture, so much so that it almost goes unnoticed. But The Big Step, an anti-gambling charity, makes the harsh reality of sports gambling explicit on their website: 3500 gambling logos are displayed in a single televised Premier League match, with £1.5 billion spent by the gambling industry each year on marketing. The statistics reveal a clear problem, and at a time where professional sports are so synonymous with gambling culture, we must ask: what protection is in place for players? Moreover, what protection is there for the millions of adults and children tuning in every week?
No one can deny that gambling, when taken too far, is one of football’s major problems today, and some moves have been made to tackle the problem. Gambling has been an issue on the government’s agenda, with a recent White Paper on the topic, but a cross-party Culture, Media, and Sport committee called for them to push further in regulation and improve research on the effects of gambling advertising. In April 2023, Premier League clubs officially pledged to remove gambling sponsorship from the front of matchday shirts, which Gary Lineker applauded as an ‘excellent decision’; however, that won’t happen until the 2026/27 season, and even then, shirt sleeves and stadiums are fair game for advertising.
These steps against gambling advertising are a start, but for many, they are not enough. Ivan Toney is just one example of the millions of people who have been affected by gambling addiction, and in an industry so saturated by and profiting from betting culture, the problem doesn’t seem like it will go away on its own. Only time will tell if the football industry will take a firmer stand.
“A pile of US dollar banknotes and a football ball on it” by wuestenigel is licensed under CC BY 2.0.