For a vivid example of just how suffused football has become with gambling, it’s hard to beat the game between Brentford and Nottingham Forest in January 2024.It’s not just that Brentford were sponsored by South African betting company Hollywoodbets, and owned by Matthew Benham, who also owns a research company for professional gamblers. Or that their opponents, Forest, bore the logo of Kaiyun Sports, an Asian gambling company.Nor is it merely that the mobile advertising hoardings scrolled relentlessly through ads for Hollywoodbets, Bet365 and Betway.For Darragh McGee, that’s only the start of it. In his new book, Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport, he describes what happened just after the opening goal on three minutes by Brazilian midfielder Danilo.The goal “simultaneously silences the home crowd and triggers one of the most curious fan phenomena of modern times”, he writes. “The mass removal of smartphones from pockets, apps opened in haste, brows momentarily furrowed, as fingers flick and minds migrate into a live in-play matrix where ads endlessly stream on everything from goals to corners to cards.”It is equally notable that after 19 minutes, when Ivan Toney scores an equaliser for Brentford, there’s just the briefest mention of his long absence from the game. Toney had been banned for 11 months for 232 breaches of its gambling laws, reduced to eight months when he was diagnosed with a gambling addiction. McGee, an assistant professor at University of Bath, has been concerned about the influence of the gambling industry on football for years. It’s a problem that has grown rapidly, and one that, in his view, is about to get worse. “The World Cup in two weeks will break all records, outside of the Super Bowl,” he explains. “It is going to be a feeding frenzy for gambling firms.”It’s a source of great concern for McGee, who is not just a football fan, but a former player. Having grown up in Donegal, he played for Finn Harps for a spell, and what motivates him is a sincere concern for the integrity of a game that is increasingly comfortable with close relationships with gambling companies.You can’t ignore the fact that there are profound questions here about harm, big business, corporate ethics and technology— Darragh McGeeMcGee got his entry into academia through football, having gone on a sports scholarship to Canada, where he studied at the University of Toronto, and then attended Loughborough University. Betting was rare in Canada, in his experience. Apart from “one trip to Woodbine racecourse outside Toronto, and a trip to Niagara Falls, I never thought about, nor saw, gambling”. When he came back to Ireland for Christmas in 2015 he went to his local pub in Letterkenny “and it was like being dropped into another world”. His friends were on their smartphones placing bets, high-profile actors such as Ray Winstone were fronting aggressive advertising campaigns, “the marketing ban was gone, the acca was reaching its height and football was now saturated,” he says.When he got his first tenure-track job at the University of Bath the following year, he began a decade of research on gambling that has led him to some very firm conclusions about the behaviour of the gambling industry. “By the time you look behind the machinery and understand how it operates, you can’t ignore the fact that there are profound questions here about harm, big business, corporate ethics, technology, and I would be morally compromised not to be asking those big questions at this moment in history,” he says.At the centre of it all is the smartphone – “the operation system for our lives now”, as he describes it – which gives us an entire world of diversion at the flick of a finger, tapping into a dopamine-trickling state of semiconscious repetitive behaviour. It’s that and worse with gambling, McGee says.Gambling apps on smartphones make it easier for people to bet at any time. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images “If you go back 15 years, you could place a bet at the betting shop, or you could place a series of bets, and you could get into quite an immersive and impulsive state of play in there, but it was highly unlikely that you could remain in a betting shop over a long period of time without somebody intervening,” he says. “Today you have this capacity for the firms to be with you 24/7, and that is no exaggeration.”[ Mark O'Connell: Fewer people are having babies. Could smartphones be the reason?Opens in new window ]Their targeting of young men is of particular concern to McGee, and in his book he points to a case taken by a young man in the high court in London against SkyBet in 2020. It revealed many of the key elements of the core gambling industry strategy, specifically the way personal data is gathered and used to convince and cajole gamblers – sometimes vulnerable gamblers – into laying down their money.My ambition with the book is for the likes of [Roy] Keane, [Gary] Neville and others to go, you know what, the time has passed where we can endorse these industries — Darragh McGeeThe same online playbook is being deployed to grow the gambling industry worldwide. Gambling companies are fighting tooth and nail to expand their customer bases in the US, which is rolling out legal gambling state by state. Asia has become an enormous hub for professional gambling syndicates. And several companies have begun to aggressively build markets in Africa.McGee finds the approach to African expansion particularly objectionable. “A lot of young men are trapped in what they call wait-hood, where they’re waiting for an opportunity to help them break out of precarity. Gambling firms are exploiting that.”At the core of it is football. The tactic by which they grow their market is particularly telling in Africa, McGee says, explaining they rely on well known figures such as Didier Drogba and Jay-Jay Okocha, with slogans such as “Proudly African: Bet with the best” and “Playground for Kings”.“They’re using a kind of pan-African nationalism,” he said. “It’s colonial in a very, very unstomachable manner.”McGee has a particular frustration with the entire concept of so-called brand ambassadors who lend their fame and reputations to gambling companies for profit.“it’s the blurring of the lines between broadcasting and gambling content,” he said, pointing to the likes of The Overlap, the podcast featuring Gary Neville, Roy Keane, and Jamie Carragher, which was sponsored by SkyBet when it launched.“People ask me what are my ambitions for the book – that’s one of them,” he said. “For the likes of Keane, Neville and others to go, you know what, the time has passed where we can endorse these industries. “They are idolised by tens of millions, and we know that admiration often leads to emulation – kids take their life cues from these figures,” he says. Such brand ambassadors are on the wrong side of history, McGee believes, like television news presenters in the 1960s who smoked while they read the headlines, and stopped midway to rhapsodise about the virtues of, say, Parliament cigarettes. “I think it needs to be challenged. The blurring of lines between broadcasting and gambling content has to stop.”He’s under no illusions that this will happen quickly, and he knows it is possible it will get worse in the short term, especially in the next few weeks. As he sees it, the World Cup is perfectly structured for gambling companies to draw in new customers, with three or four games a day over six weeks – almost constant action generating innumerable data points to turn into millions of bets for billions of football fans.Gambling companies aim to use the World Cup as a huge customer-recruitment operation. Photograph: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images “In terms of a recruitment device for the industry, this is the biggest going – it is ripe for the kind of repetitive cycle of in-play betting that is the business model of every sports gambling firm,” McGee says. “It will shatter revenue records.”Gambling companies have already begun the hard sell, offering all kinds of inducements to put on bets with odds that are too good to be true.“It could be a 50/1 bet on Harry Kane to have a shot on target against Panama – and on paper that looks like an absolute no-brainer,” he says.“You’ll think, ‘Wow, that’s easy money’, but you’re not realising that your one pound of fungible currency will be converted into a digital form of currency on the platform, and you’ll get a tiny, minuscule return on your actual bet, and the rest will be converted into bet credits.”Those credits can only be redeemed by actually using them to bet, which is the incentive to get a new gambler into a repetitive cycle during an unfolding series of the world’s most high-profile football matches.“Who knows what it will do in terms of gambling harm, but what we do know is it will recruit – it will do more for the recruitment of a new generation of gamblers globally than maybe any other sporting event historically," McGee says.Book cover It doesn’t end there, though. The key for gambling companies is not just to get them gambling on sports events but to drag them into other parts of the betting app.“We see it time and time again, and that’s why these mega events are not just a harmless bet on the football,” McGee says. ”It will begin a process that can lead to the online casino.”The gambling industry won’t change until it is forced to, and it won’t be forced until critical mass is reached, and critical mass won’t be reached until the stakeholders in the game act. That requires a change of attitude from everyone in the game – fans, footballers, clubs and leagues – in order to reclaim football.“There has to be action from within the game itself,” McGee says. “Fans must become politicised, and they must attempt to push back against it.”