Callum McCarthy | UK sport must learn lessons from Italy’s gambling advertising ban

There is growing public and political antipathy towards the UK betting industry and its ubiquitous sponsorship of sport in the country. Callum McCarthy says the industry needs to heed lessons from Italy.

Callum McCarthy

Sport has always had a sugar daddy it’s been made to feel ashamed of. First it was tobacco. Then alcohol. Gambling is merely the vice du jour.

With the former two missions mostly accomplished, the focus of European health organisations has switched to the gambling industry, which has carpet-bombed professional football with sponsorship and advertising over the past five years. There are now over 80 separate sponsorship deals between betting companies and football clubs in the Premier League, LaLiga, the Bundesliga and Serie A alone, with more in football’s lower tiers.

The gambling industry and its supporters have maintained that as long there is no concrete evidence to prove advertising and sponsorship is harmful, a ban could never be enacted. The Italian sports industry probably said the same before the Italian government laid down a blanket ban on advertising by betting firms last April.

Regardless of its adherence to the law and the lack of specific scientific studies, an increasing number of politicians and media outlets are saying that sport’s relationship with betting brands has gone too far.

If it’s not careful, the UK sports industry could lose out on hundreds of millions of pounds in sponsorship revenue.

Lessons to be learned

The Italian coalition government of Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) made good on the latter’s promise to ban betting sites from advertising on television, radio and online in April 2019. Their argument was not based on scientific studies but it resonated with an Italian public that felt swamped streams of adverts for online casinos and sportsbooks.

Serie A clubs immediately said goodbye to almost €20m in seasonal sponsorship fees.

“Objectively speaking, the [Italian gambling] industry should take their fair share of responsibility for what happened in Italy,” says Quirino Mancini, a partner at Rome-based Tonucci & Partners, as well as their global head of the Gaming & Gambling Practice. “Among the many failures, there has been a failure to anticipate the political and regulatory storm, and a failure to give themselves a code of conduct that would show politicians and the public opinion that they are willing to do something to limit the offer of gambling.”

In the UK, the gambling industry’s efforts to self-police have barely affected public and political opinion. The ‘whistle-to-whistle’ rule, which prevents UK gambling operators from advertising on television during live sport, has failed to meaningfully reduce the amount of messaging during matches.

A study conducted by Ipsos Mori found there were a total of 974 instances of gambling advertising during coverage of a Premier League match between Bournemouth and Crystal Palace last December. This includes pitchside advertising, shirt sponsorship and the sponsored screens that appear during player and manager interviews.

In the UK, gambling brands now make up between eight and 10 per cent of all television advertising. Their ubiquitous nature is a regular topic of debate in UK media and politics, partly due to lobbying from public health and gambling addiction charities.

It is becoming an easy PR win for politicians looking for a boost in public support. Having seen the ban unfold in Italy, Mancini argues that if UK sport wants to prevent the loss of revenue from gambling sponsorships, the sports and gambling industries must lobby together in order to have their voices heard.

“If the stakeholders in the UK should fail to do so they should expect the same consequences, if not worse, that we have seen in Italy in the wake of the gambling ban. It’s inevitable,” Mancini says. “They should take early action. It requires a coordinated, consistent effort.”

FA Cup furore

The latest UK media uproar was sparked by FA Cup matches being streamed on UK gambling sites.

From 2018-19 onward, seven UK online betting sites hold streaming rights to FA Cup matches not selected for broadcast by either UK public-service broadcaster the BBC or pay-television broadcaster BT Sport. In order to watch these games, viewers must first either place a bet on the match or have an account in credit with that site.

IMG Arena, which holds global betting rights to the FA Cup from 2018-19 to 2023-24, struck the deals almost two years ago. But this season’s FA Cup third round was used as a platform for the Football Association’s ‘Heads Up’ campaign, with matches kicking off at 3:01pm so that fans could “take a minute to think about looking after their mental health”. The incongruity raised hackles.

“We’re very angry as a government about this (betting rights) arrangement,” said UK sports minister Nigel Adams. “We’ve asked the Football Association to look at this deal and see what opportunities there are to rescind this element of the deal.”

Negative media coverage of the deal was consistent enough to provoke an investigation into the deal by the Gambling Commission, the UK’s industry regulator, and prompt confirmation from the UK government that it would seek to amend the Gambling Act, which licenses online betting and allows for gambling advertising and sponsorship.

The FA moved to ensure that matches no longer appear exclusively on gambling sites, but most experts surveyed by SportBusiness said that even if the gambling and sports industries decided to stop live streaming on betting sites, it would now be too late to alleviate the pressure. Mancini, whose clients are now suffering the effects of inaction of those industries, says the blanket ban in Italy came “like lightning on a sunny day”.

The odds are now stacked against the continuation of gambling’s relationship with UK sport. And if the latter wants to keep a penny of the many, many millions it receives from online betting companies, it needs to do better than action after the fact.