A friend of mine got sucked into gambling a few years ago. I won’t use his name but he was sucked in bad. Bad enough that he looked over a bridge and thought about ending everything. Bad enough that he drove up and down motorways at terrifying speeds, hoping he might crash, after lost nights at casinos.
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He was luckily able to bring himself back from the brink. Not everyone does, though. It’s hard to put yourself into the shoes of that person: the problem gambler, the addict.
He did, however, try to explain it in an open letter he posted online to Brigid Simmonds, chair of the Betting & Gaming Council, and Michael Dugher, then the shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport.
“It’s a hamster wheel of misery,” he wrote. “Gambling owns them. Lives in them. Comforts them. Loathes them. Goads them. Waits for them around every corner. Pretends to be their friend while simultaneously destroying the very core of their being.”
And reading these words can change your perspective when you look at the football industry, with all its contradictions and hypocrisies, and try to make sense of why, or how, a high-profile, rich and successful footballer could succumb to gambling.
A few years back, I might have been sitting here writing what a fool Ivan Toney had been. What a fool to put himself in a position, as a Premier League player, where he had got an eight-month ban through gambling. And maybe, when we get more information, it will be easy to conclude that, yes, there are parts of this story when he has been foolish in the extreme.
At the same time, I cannot help think there is a bigger debate to be had here about the sport’s relationship with gambling. That, to me, feels more worthwhile than bashing up Toney without being in possession of the full facts.
As it stands, the written reasons into Toney’s case have not been released by the FA. We don’t know what he was betting on or whether he was using inside information as a player for Brentford and, previously, Peterborough United and Newcastle United, featuring loan spells at Wigan Athletic and Scunthorpe United.
All we have been told so far is that the FA initially charged him with 262 breaches of its betting rules from February 25, 2017, to January 23, 2021, before withdrawing 30 of those charges.
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Toney admitted the offences and will be banned until January 16 next year. He will not even be allowed to train with his club until mid-September. Brentford, on the face of it, are fully entitled to be horrified about losing their best player.
What has not been disclosed, however, is what brought Toney to this position and the mitigating circumstances, if there are any.
Every footballer knows there are rules in place and consequences for those who ignore them. So what was it? Boredom? Recklessness? More money than sense? Or had he been sucked in, too? Is there something more to this story that, once the FA releases the full report, will provide some context to what he has done, and why?
If not, then plainly Toney has been stupid in the extreme. For now, though, there are other questions that ought to be asked. And the first is this: is it any wonder that people in football, at all levels, are being enticed into betting when the adverts and temptations are almost everywhere you look?
Last September, I was at the court case of two ex-pros, Alan Rogers and Steven Jennings, who were accused of blackmailing a football manager who, by his own admission, had a gambling addiction.
The case against Rogers and Jennings, who denied the charges, was dropped because the alleged victim made it clear he did not want to continue and the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no public interest in going through with the trial. A court order was put in place to prevent the disclosure of anything that could lead to the manager’s identification.
It was still fairly shocking, however, to hear in court that the manager had gambled £879,000 ($1million) across two years, accruing losses of £270,000, and that the judge had “concern about his welfare”.
The manager, it was said, had up to eight betting accounts. His gambling, ranging from £5 to £400, included a “handful” of bets on football matches. At some point, he, too, is facing the possibility of a long ban from the football authorities.
If so, I suspect there will be a rush to judgment and little sympathy or understanding about the spiralling effects of addiction and its almost intolerable pressures, chasing the next bet, never being in full control of your life.
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It also makes me wonder whether football, as an industry, cares a great deal about this issue (as in, really cares) when, on the one hand, it prohibits any form of betting while, on the other, it promotes gambling … and kerching!
Every time Toney has pulled on Brentford’s colours this season, he has been advertising Hollywoodbets as the club’s front-of-shirt sponsor. When he joined Brentford, they were playing in the Skybet Championship. Matthew Benham, Brentford’s owner, made his fortune from a betting and data-analysis company. Their ground, like all Premier League grounds, is full of advertising trying to tempt you into sticking on a bet. It is everywhere. Not just in the stadiums, either. It’s on television. It’s on The Athletic (let’s not be hypocritical about this), and just about every other media outlet.
The FA, to be fair, does seem to recognise how this looks. It took a while, though, and the governing body made a heap of money before anyone seemed to point out the double standards. In 2017, the FA terminated its contract with Ladbrokes and announced it would no longer have a betting partner.
Other changes are being made. Under pressure from the UK government, Premier League clubs have collectively agreed not to have the names of betting firms across the chests of their shirts by the start of the 2026-27 season.
As it stands, Bournemouth, Leeds, Everton, Fulham, Newcastle, Southampton and West Ham all profit this way, as well as Brentford. They will, however, be allowed to continue featuring gambling brands on the players’ shirt sleeves and pitch perimeter advertising.
And Toney? Before him, there was the case of Joey Barton, who was banned for 18 months in 2017 and publicly embarrassed the FA by highlighting some of the hypocrisies: “What are the FA going to do, march into Ladbrokes and say, ‘Show us everyone who’s had a bet?’ Ladbrokes are going to say, ‘Eff off, we pay you £10million a year, keep your mouth shut’. Do the FA not understand that’s hush money? Because if they don’t do it to Ladbrokes, they can’t do it to Betfair, Paddy Power, William Hill.”
Apart from the fact the Ladbrokes deal was worth an annual £4million to the FA, it seems like a valid point.
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And Toney won’t be the last. He has messed up, ultimately, and it is a wretched way to end a season in which he has played with distinction, made his England debut and found himself behind only Erling Haaland and Harry Kane in the list of Premier League scorers.
Toney is a big name these days. That means big headlines, big publicity and big controversy. It also means big responsibilities.
It is just difficult not to think that, behind the headlines, there is another story that puts the whole football industry, rather than just one player, to shame.
(Top photo: Clive Rose/Getty Images)
