With the news last week that West Ham have announced a new long-term sponsorship deal with the betting firm Betway it sees the club return to having a betting company as their principle sponsor. Betway has replaced Alpari due to the latter’s recent insolvency and subsequent closure of its UK branch. With the increased involvement that betting firms have in the present day the question is being raised whether it is right that firms should be given such a huge platform to advertise on, considering how much gambling addiction can affect an individual?
But first, let’s get the obvious problem out of the way. West Ham’s shirt was arguably the smartest looking in the Premier League and Betway’s logo has turned it into something that looks, quite simply, awful. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future.
However, the real issue lies in the morality of advertising gambling rather than the aesthetics of a logo. The industry has boomed dramatically in the last 20 or so years with about nine million Britons now gambling a year online. This can be attributed to two factors. Firstly, Microgaming Software Systems Ltd, based on the Isle of Man, created the world’s first online casino in 1994. The company has a turnover of hundreds of millions of pounds a year and a website that boasts of being the world’s largest provider of online gaming software. Ladbrokes and 32Red are among the 120 online casino operators it provides with software. Secondly, the gambling industry’s boom can also be linked with the Blair governments passing of the 2005 Gambling Act, which allowed companies to advertise in the UK.
There are estimated to be around 500,000 gambling addicts in Britain and the number of people in danger of becoming an addict is nearly 1 million. With betting firm adverts constantly on our TV and in sport at the moment, combined with the easy accessibility thanks to Internet sites this number only looks set to increase. People are able to spend hours playing online games without realizing time, and money, is slipping away.
While addiction can affect anyone studies have shown that you are more likely to develop a problem if you have a family history of problem gambling and if you started at a young age. Here lies one of the biggest issues – is it right that young West Ham supporters should be cheering on their heroes with Betway inexplicably plastered across their chests? The number of young people who have gambling issues has increased mainly because of Internet gambling, but also due to the fact that they are subjected to this world everywhere they look, whether they are watching football on TV or watching their football team play. If their parents have faced gambling problems then it’s also more likely they will face similar problems later on in their lives.
Problem gambling has been called the ‘hidden addiction’, meaning that unlike other addictions such as alcohol or drug addiction, the physical effects of the problem are very difficult to see. You are unlikely to know that someone has a gambling problem unless they tell you. It’s perhaps time that people did something to curb the amount of advertising and the quick way to getting rich that quite a few adverts look to portray, alongside all the incentives that the firms are giving to encourage people to join. Indeed the first thing you see on the Betway website is ‘get a £50 free bet when you join us today’ in huge white letters. You have to do a bit of scrolling to actually find the various areas on the website itself.
As a West Ham fan I have a big issue with the club being sponsored by a betting firm, an opinion I’m sure many other fans share, both for West Ham and other clubs in the same boat. Gambling addiction is fast becoming a more serious issue in our country with the increase in advertising and online gaming resulting in over £7 billion being spent by people on gambling each year. Judge Jamie Tabor QC said at Gloucester Crown Court: ‘Gambling is all too easy to embark upon these days, probably because of the advertising on TV and the amount of internet gambling available to anyone unwise enough to make use of it. The bookies always win.’ These comments were made following the sentencing in 2013 of 22 year-old Jack Keylock who resorted to burglary to pay off gambling debts.
Yes West Ham were in need of a sponsor following Alpari’s insolvency but as a fan I would have liked a degree of morality to have been put into the search process. By jumping on the gambling bandwagon it runs the risk of exposing more vulnerable people to something that can be very difficult to get out of. I’m particularly thinking of our young hammers. Maybe in the future more people will agree that we need to go a different way rather than the Betway.
