COMMENT: It's time to reclaim the Sunderland shirt

When it comes to football's toxic relationship with gambling, the stakes are too high to turn a blind eye - and it's the last thing we should want Sunderland involved in.

Lenin once said that “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”. 

Now, I’m not usually inclined to quote Lenin when writing about Sunderland, but it's fair to say that we endured several decades worth of news in September. It was a month that saw a new Prime Minister, a new King and a crashed currency, and so it was a very good month in which to bury very bad news. 

The Premier League was due to vote on a voluntary ban on gambling advertising in July, but that was postponed when Gambling Minister Chris Philp resigned, along with the rest of Boris Johnson's government. 

The vote was postponed to September when… well, you know the rest. 

September came and went with no vote taking place. And so, the vexed issue of gambling advertising remains unresolved. In truth, the vote would've done little to address the issue, as a voluntary ban was expected to come with a host of terms and conditions that would effectively make it worthless. 

So why should you care? After all, millions of people have a harmless flutter on the football every week, right?

Well, it's true that the few quid you might spend on your accumulator is no big deal. Betting itself is not the issue. The issue is the betting industry.

Whatever your own relationship with gambling, the stats associated with the industry should give us all pause for thought.

The CEO of Bet365 earned a salary of £421m in 2020. The pandemic was a boon for bookmakers generally. Flutter Entertainment - Paddy Power’s parent company - saw revenue increase by 36.7% in 2021. 

Unsurprisingly, the National Gambling Helpline saw a 8% increase in calls between 2020 and 2021. According to the Office of National Statistics, 3.8% of Brits are at-risk gamblers. This number climbs to 4.9% in the north east, and at-risk gamblers are disproportionally likely to be younger men. 

For the at-risk, gambling is far from harmless. Instead, it can be a path towards debt, bankruptcy, family breakdown and, in the most extreme cases, suicide.

These statistics are merely the tip of the iceberg. For every problem gambler seeking help, there are many others hiding in denial. And behind every individual story is a network of affected friends and family. The greed of the industry demands that misery is baked into the business model. 

And so the gambling industry turns to football - a game that inspires devotion in the same young men that they hope to seduce. 

Everton's sponsor, Stake.com, recently used imagery of the club's players to promote a free bet offer that was exclusively available to customers who gambled $5,000 within the last week. Unless you happen to earn CEO-of-Bet365 money, gambling $260,000 a year means you've got a very serious addiction. 

Everton fans have been among the most vocal opponents to gambling advertising, led by lifelong fan and recovering gambling addict Ben Melvin. A petition opposing Stake.com’s sponsorship now stands at over 30,000 signatures.

The efforts of Everton fans have been supported by The Big Step, who are one of the leading voices in the campaign to rid football from gambling advertising for good. The Big Step are backed by a number of EFL and non-league clubs. Sunderland is not currently one of them.

It won’t have escaped your attention that Sunderland got back into bed with the gambling industry this season. We’re now back to the ludicrous position of removing the SpreadEx Sports logo from the shirts we sell to kids, then exposing those same kids to wall-to-wall ads for the company every time they watch a game, visit the stadium or follow the lads on social media. 

If CBeebies started running Marlboro ads, furious parents would have the channel taken off air. But when it comes to football, we turn a blind eye.

We are also one of the 72 EFL clubs who were entitled to a share of SkyBet customers' losses. Under that deal, people signing up to a SkyBet account were asked to state which club they support. The club then took a share of every penny that customer lost. This parasitical deal lasted 6 years until the plug was quietly pulled at the end of the 2019-20 season.   

Gambling sponsorship is commercially lucrative, currently legal but morally indefensible. That's particularly the case for a club like ours - a club with a proud history of supporting its local community, and being supported by that same community in turn. The Sunderland shirt should be sacred, and not defiled by an industry that causes such harm to vulnerable people in the north east. Our club should not and must not make money off the misery of its own supporters. 

It's time we reclaimed the shirt. We should pressure our owners to take a stand. We should join Everton fans and The Big Step in the fight against gambling advertising in football. We should help them put pressure on the government to rid the game of the gambling industry for good. 

We owe it to the kids who are being exposed to harmful ads every time they watch the lads. Kids who could grow up to have their lives ruined though addiction. Kids who could lose a parent to it. 

Because whatever the SpreadEx deal is worth to Sunderland, no deal is worth that.