Football fallout disrupts Select Committee hearings on Gambling Harms

Yesterday’s Select Committee hearings on gambling harms were side-tracked as ministers probed the UKGC for a response on gambling sponsorships in football

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) is closely monitoring developments around sports betting sponsorships in Belgium and the Netherlands, the regulator informed MPs yesterday.

Tim Miller, Director of Policy at the Commission, spoke to members of the Health and Social Care Committee this week, along with other representatives involved in UK gambling policy on harm prevention and social research.

On the agenda, MPs were set to probe upcoming changes to the national strategy on gambling harms, yet, unsurprisingly the relationship between betting and football, hijacked the hearings.

The debate around this topic has been continuous, as the 2023 Gambling Act review White Paper and subsequent Premier League voluntary ban on shirt sponsorship has done little to appease divided camps.

Miller explained: “With everything that’s in the White Paper, we will need to properly evaluate the impact. If you look overseas, for example, where some of these bans on sponsorship have already been in place, Italy and Belgium would be two examples.

“What we’ve seen is actually football clubs finding any opportunity they can to try and circumvent those bans by, for example, no longer having a formal betting sponsor on their shirt, but actually then taking one of those companies’ other brands.”

The sporting story

The scenario Miller was referring to has played out in Italy since 2019 and Belgium since the start of the year. In Italy, clubs have been signing ‘infotainment’ deals with media brands operated by bookmakers, which still carry the betting firm’s branding but do not function as an actual betting site, instead as a sports news site.

In Belgium, where a ban came into effect at the start of the year, clubs like RSC Anderlecht and Club Brugge KV have been warned by the Belgian Gambling Commission (BGC) for circumventing gambling rules.

The Premier League’s sponsorship ban comes into effect for the 2026/27 season and both clubs and operators must adhere to a Code of Conduct on sponsorship, which has now been adopted by all major English sports leagues. Pressure on the sports-betting relationship remains, however, and the UKGC states that it will be monitoring developments both home and abroad closely.

‘If you’re going to put these things in place, what you do have to do is have proper evaluation to make sure you’ve actually delivered the outcome that you’re expecting,” Miller said.

Football is not the only sport with strong links to gambling, however, with rugby league, rugby union, cricket, boxing, darts, snooker and many more providing valuable marketing for betting firms – and in return gaining a strong source of revenue.

Concerns around the societal impact of these partnerships are just as strong, though not as visibly expressed as with football. Heather Wardle, Professor of Gambling Research and Policy at the University of Glasgow, raised the topic of esports.

“We talk about football all the time, it’s not just football, it’s esports,” she said. “For example, we did some research where we looked at the sponsorship of esports teams. 50% of esports teams have gambling sponsors and they have betting partners.

“They have their key eSports professionals doing YouTube, Tiktok videos, promoting the brands that support their team that obviously has clear appeal to young people, and it’s very overlooked.”

Overall though, football remains front and centre in the debate around betting sponsorship – given the sports popularity in the UK and globally along with the visibility of the Premier League this is hardly surprising.

MPs showed clear discontent with the number of betting deals present in the top-flight of English football. One legislator threw a jab that the ban ‘hardly seems voluntary’ given that 55% of Premier League clubs have a betting partner, though the UKGC’s Miller did remind him that the measure has not yet fully come into effect.

New Levy needs to “learn-&-localise”

Beyond the flashy and attention grabbing topic of sports, the panel also got into the more nitty gritty and heavy regulatory topics of the UK’s new research, education and training (RET) levy, another key proposal of the 2023 White Paper.

The levy will see bookmakers make mandatory payments to support RET around gambling harm throughout the UK with the National Health Service (NHS) acting as primary overseer of this levy and how it is distributed.

“Through our health mission, we are committed to shortening the time spent in ill health by preventing harms before they occur,” Andrew Vereker, Deputy Director for Tobacco, Alcohol and Gambling, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, told the Committee during its second panel of the day.

“In that context, I think the levy is a real opportunity, as the previous panel said, to improve treatment, to enable high quality research and to support effective prevention activity – so there’s definitely more that we can do through the levy.”

A debate remains as to how levy funds will be distributed geographically and what programmes the funding will focus on. Lucy Hubber, Director of Public Health Nottingham, told MPs that a localised approach to gambling harm would be most effective.

Public health directors and other health policy stakeholders are also keen to ensure that funding for treatment and particularly research is independent of the industry. This is indicative of a common sentiment which has built up over the years that research into gambling harm has been too heavily influenced by gambling industry interests.

“A large number of areas, including Nottingham, are leading the way. They’re doing health needs assessments and then developing local strategies,” Hubber remarked.

“What we haven’t got is a good, independent research system that is pulling the learning from that. There’s lots of local learning, there’s increasing networks where people are sharing the good practice of learning.

“But what I’m really hoping is with the levy and its requirement around research, is we will be focusing some of that activity in understanding not just interventions that work well b ut how we organize ourselves and how we regulate and we have to make sure that both the treatment and the research is independent of the industry.

Frustrated camps

To an observer, the general sentiment which permeated throughout yesterday’s parliamentary panel sessions seemed to be one of frustration.

Both MPs and assembled policy stakeholders expressed a lot of frustration with the way research and treatment has been handled, the extent of sponsorship and marketing, and the perceived lack of power local authorities have when dealing with the industry.

“Britain has one of the most liberal regimes with the fewest restrictions,” said Professor Wardle, who pointed to an ‘imbalance of power’ between local authorities and betting companies concerning the opening of as a concerning example.

There was also optimism though, with policymakers like Miller confident in the White Paper rollout and its wider impact, while health directors and researchers are hopeful that the RET levy will change the game for the better.

Looking ahead though, it seems that the liberal regime referenced by Wardle will continue to face pressure way beyond the implementation of White Paper recommendations….