Football & Betting – Who Would Have Thought

It’s like rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you’ve already paid. It is of course the weird and ironic relationship football has with the world of betting. A relationship that is not only ironic but extremely unfortunate. Who would have thought …

As the dust settles on the revelation that Brentford and England forward Ivan Toney has been banned from football for 8 months due to his gambling practices it is worth considering the relationship the sport has with betting. This ban, when viewed in isolation, is a fair response to somebody who broke the rules and allegedly placed bets against his own team despite having an influence on the result in question. But of course nothing exists in isolation and to truly understand the irony of the situation one must delve into a couple of other facts. Yes Toney has been banned for betting but not only is his team sponsored by a betting firm, his team’s owner made his money in the sports betting markets and also owns among other things, a betting exchange – an exchange who also briefly sponsored the Brentford jersey and old stadium roof. 

Matthew Benham is of course the owner of Brentford Football club, but before he became the saviour of the club Matthew entered the gambling game, when Tony Bloom, who later became the owner of Brighton, hired him to work in the industry. Using a statistical model which was able to predict the probabilities of football scores more accurately than the bookies, Matthew made significant money in the Asian markets. After a fall out with Bloom, Benham went on to co-found another statistics company called Smartodds, and as part of a group of investors he formed his own betting exchange called Matchbook. 

For those unfamiliar with the lingo, a betting exchange differs from a bookmaker in that the ‘community’ can act as either the backer or layer – in other words you place a bet and another user can choose to play the part of the bookmaker and lay the bet. Statistical modelling is what is used by bookmakers, professional gamblers and also sports recruitment – Moneyball, for those interested in movies as well as sports – to gain advantage in the market. 

This may all seem very trivial, and is by no means a slant on Matthew Benham at all, in fact your humble narrator even worked for the aforementioned exchange in the past – but with personal experience and a wealth of research all bundled together it is clear one would require a degree in chartered accountancy to unravel how everything inside the betting industry fits together – backing, laying, modelling, ‘investing’, it all adds up to two things. Money and advantage. 

While owners with a history of gambling such as Bloom and Benham have a heavy influence on the game, the bigger issue in the complex relationship between gambling and football lies firmly on the chest – that is to say the large sponsorship logo that adorns the shirt of 8 of the 20 current Premier League teams, at time of writing, others have gambling firms on their sleeve and many more have ‘official betting partners’ listed among their sponsors. 

A ground-breaking agreement under which Premier League clubs have banned match-day front-of-shirt sponsorship deals with gambling companies from the summer of 2026 has been announced. It is a mixed message though, as it is riddled with flaws and loopholes. Founder of The Big Step, a campaign dedicated to ending the longstanding relationship between football and betting, James Grimes has said “Just moving logos to a different part of the kit while allowing pitch-side advertising to continue is totally incoherent” – and of course he is right. The deal which sounds ground-breaking at first glance begins to wilt on further inspection. It is voluntary, doesn’t include the sleeves, nor the hoardings, nor the training kit. It also does not include betting adverts before, during or after the game. 

The link between football and gambling needs to be cut. In a chat with a friend about his love of betting he admitted – “I love gambling but it is a vice. I had £1600 in my Skybet account. In one day I managed to lose over 1K of that, to the point that my buddy had to take my phone and lock it in his room. It was a bit of a joke, but also I know if he didn’t do that I’d have lost the final £600. My pals were buzzed for me, “Mate you turned £5 into £500 in 4 months” but really I turned it into £1600 and fucked it up”. Skybet had a slogan, “It Matters More when there’s Money on it”, Betfair insisted “This is Play” – your narrator even coined a slogan for Matchbook “Together We Bet” – there is a running theme that has to stop. It is all rosy while you are winning, but when you lose, you can lose hard. Gambling is about two things, money and advantage. You run out of one and the other doesn’t stick around for long.

Which brings us back to the ban facing Ivan Toney. In isolation, a man using his position to gain advantage and win money while betting on football, being banned for 8 months from the game is beyond fair if not lenient, but as we have seen in this article Mr Toney doesn’t exist in isolation, nor is this an isolated problem. The game is owned, sponsored and completely at one with the gambling industry. But when one of their own happens to partake he is banned – not allowed to even train for half of the ban – rather than actually try to fix the problem of why he did it and how it was allowed to develop into such an addiction, he is simply kicked out of the loop. 

If Alanis Morissette was ever to get around to a little rewrite of her famous song so as to actually include ironic situations, she wouldn’t go far wrong if she were to include this debacle in there somewhere. But I guess an old man turning ninety-eight, winning the lottery and dying the next day is as close as we will get. Who would have thought …