James Grimes is out the other side of it now, but he is willing to go back into the scary corners of his memory when necessary. He does it because he cares and he cares because he was an addict himself and so he knows the devastating, corroding power of those many adverts for gambling at football matches. 

Campaigning against them has become his work, but the kicker there is that revisiting the traumas of his unravelling is central to the gig.

‘It can be hard,’ he told me on Friday – and you will get why. He always loved football, used to go to Peterborough home and away, but then he dropped his first fiver at the bookie at the age of 16. By 18, he had all the apps on his phone and by 28, he had lost £100,000, so basically every penny he had. But the money was not nearly the worst of his losses.

‘Not even close,’ he says. ‘Money was a tool to the buzz but the hard parts were the places it took me to. It wrecked me in every way it could. The shame and the guilt of it, the suicidal thoughts, they are the worst bits. It takes away your identity. I was a motivated, young guy and ended up hopeless, sleeping in a train station.’

Grimes is five years recovered now and good on him. He is on his feet and runs a campaigning group, The Big Step, which works to rid the football landscape of gambling companies. With his experiences he has the ability to put a human face on what we understand about the problem football has with gambling.

Premier League clubs voted in favour of a ban on betting firms appearing as the main sponsor 

There are eight teams currently playing in the Premier League with gambling sponsorships

He can look at the regulations belatedly announced by the Premier League on Thursday, which will ban gambling advertising on the fronts of shirts from 2026, and he knows better than most why that is a progressive move.

But he also has far more justification to feel cynical and that comes down to seeing the issue through the unfiltered eyes of someone who knows exactly what he is looking at.

It is the level of exposure to the messaging of gambling that is the key in all of this. The ubiquity of it. The sheer volume of the opportunities to bet during a match and the ease of it all, because like with so many others, that is what sucked Grimes in. That and the squalid mechanisms of bookmakers who knew how to keep him once he got there. 

Campaigner James Grimes opened up about his former gambling addiction to Mail Sport

Mail Sport’s RIATH AL-SAMARRAI (above) sat down with Grimes to discuss the Premier League’s ban on gambling sponsorships

He went through all those worrying tales we hear of the most desperate and the lost – free tickets to games, the ‘VIP’ seduction routine, the filthy acts of persuasion that his next deposit might undo the damage of the last.

Of course, blame has many faces at the gambling table. Individuals don’t always receive full sympathy in the equation but everyone has a different level of vulnerability to the risks: many of us can take it or leave it. Many stay and never get out – there are 1.4million gambling addicts in the UK. Within that it is easy and fair and right to bash the bookies as the wolf, but that can conceal the awkward truth in how sports have welcomed them so enthusiastically to dinner.

By his calculations, Grimes believes you will be exposed to 700 adverts for gambling in the average Premier League game. That’s more than six a minute and through any perspective that is astonishing and troubling. For some, the ads flash by, a rolling blur of irrelevant background detail, slogans, but that doesn’t go for everyone, so it has been a trapdoor to oblivion for folk like Grimes. For others who also recovered and went back to matches, it is akin to the ex-smoker surrounded by mates who puff relentlessly.

We can argue more on the proportions of blame and personally I’d add I quite enjoy gambling on occasion. Media organisations don’t mind the wider gambling industry either – the ads help pay the bills. But it is about the saturation of the message, which has long gone to a woefully dangerous place within football and it is revealing on that front how the Premier League became the first major sports league to act. It felt like an admission of complicity.

Give them something, because it was a big step. Brave, too, when you think how much gambling cash their clubs have had stuffed into their underwear over the years. To contextualise on that, eight of the 20 have betting sponsorship on the fronts of their shirts and those deals are collectively worth close to £60m a year, so the conversation isn’t so straightforward as telling the clubs to climb down from the pole. It took work. 

Campaigners have criticised adverts being permitted on shirt sleeves and pitchside boards 

It will still be possible to promote gambling on both advertising hoardings and shirt sleeves

But the changes are also undermined by how much will stay the same: you will still be allowed to advertise betting on sleeves. You can still advertise on the perimeter displays, which also happens to be the biggest conduit for gambling branding, according to academics at the University of Stirling. Seen in such a way, it is a restriction that doesn’t feel so restrictive at all and that throws out a confused message. 

Have a bang on that, as Ray Winstone would tell us, but don’t bang too much. It matters when there is money on it, but not too much money. It would seem there is an acceptance from the Premier League that they have contributed to a serious issue in need of addressing, but they only want to address it up to a point.

Suddenly these alterations feel awfully woolly and we would be forgiven for wondering whether the Premier League have actually done much at all. It feels as though they still peddle the same gear, they just do it in the car park.

Grimes says he has ‘mixed feelings’ about it all, as any step is better than no step, but he also admits he is sceptical that this might be a pre-emptive manoeuvre. Namely he points to a forthcoming white paper that is expected to propose an overhaul of the 2005 Gambling Act, and the cynic in him cannot help suspecting this move by the Premier League might succeed in warding off a more government intervention.

When you scratch through your brain to recall occasions when football has willingly chosen to penalise its own bottom line, that becomes a very tempting view to share.

Brighton owner Tony Bloom has welcomed the ban, which will come into force from 2026

Covering the Masters last week was a career highlight made even more compelling by the presence of Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed among the top challengers to Jon Rahm.

The source of the LIV brigade’s wealth and the chaos they have caused may have made it hard for some to root for them, but it is indisputable their presence makes any tournament more interesting.

Equally it reinforced that the breakaway tour has some of the very best players in the world.

Whatever else happens in golf’s civil war, the LIV players finally need to be recognised with world ranking points, because to continue to do otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of all parties.

The WTA, who run women’s tennis, have decided to return to China 16 months after entering a boycott in concern over the treatment of Peng Shuai. 

They did far more than most governing bodies would in such a scenario, but the fact they were never once granted a direct conversation with Peng should reaffirm to anyone in doubt that this remains a desperately sinister affair.

Significant U-turn: WTA tournaments will return to China this year after the Tour ended its boycott over concerns about the safety of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai (pictured above)