It’s not just bookies that have a stake in football betting – now we know it’s the clubs too

theguardian.com:

“It matters more when there’s money on it”, the bookmaker Sky Bet’s marketing slogan used to say. It certainly mattered to our family, when my husband Luke took his life after struggling with a devastating gambling addiction.

He’d started out betting on football every weekend with his friends, doing exactly what the ads portrayed as harmless fun. Yet it’s anything but harmless. More than a million people are addicted to gambling in the UK, and every single day at least one of them takes their life. Behind every person who dies or has their life destroyed is a network of family and friends destroyed along with them.

This week there was another boot laid into all of us harmed by gambling, as it was revealed that up to 72 English football clubs have taken a cut of the money fans lose gambling with Sky Bet. It is almost unbelievable: clubs are encouraging their own fans to gamble and then those same clubs cash in when they lose. The more fans lose, the better it is for them. A family’s ruin is the jackpot.

It’s no secret that gambling companies have hijacked football, but it comes as a shock that clubs have conspired to also profit from a harmful addiction that ultimately costs lives. This is at odds with the community-focused, family-friendly image clubs peddle, paying lip service to things such as Mental Health Awareness Week as they rifle through the pockets of people struggling with a life-threatening illness. If football was serious about preventing mental health harm and suicide, it would stop promoting and profiting from gambling – an addiction with an elevated suicide risk.

If you are in any doubt about whether gambling companies, and in turn football clubs, are benefiting from misery, consider this: 86% of online