The Football Supporters Association (FSA) and responsible gambling charity GambleAware have recently forged a partnership to promote safer gambling in football. As part of the partnership agreement, a new survey has been carried out by the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA) in conjunction with GambleAware’s safer gambling ‘Bet Regret’ campaign.
According to the survey, football clubs in the United Kingdom will need to do so much more in order to educate their fans and supports about the risks associated with gambling. Out of the 1,200 fans that participated in the survey, 10 percent admitted that they felt that the football clubs need to up their game when it comes to providing sufficient warnings with regards to problem gambling. In addition to that, only 13 percent of the respondents agree that they would be happy for their club to be sponsored by a gambling company.
The football supporters were also particularly critical of the gambling companies sponsoring individual players – a recent example is 32Red’s sponsorships of Wayne Rooney who wore the number 32 shirt at Derby County. This, for 84 percent of the respondents, was not acceptable as the clubs had gone far and the country should rethink this.
“It’s clear fans want their clubs to do more on educating their supporters about the risks of gambling and alongside GambleAware we’ll be pushing clubs, particularly those with prominent gambling sponsors, to do better,” Kevin Miles, chief executive for The Football Supporters’ Association, said.
This FSA and GambleAware survey is the first piece of joint work that the two organization have undertaken together. It is also the latest part of the ‘Bet Regret’ campaign which is a high-profile campaign educating the public about the potential impact of impulsive gambling.
Crackdown on Loot Boxes Gets More Intense
As responsible gambling initiatives get tighter, the issue of loot boxes is also getting more controversial. Recently, the United Kingdom’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport’s parliamentary committee has called for loot boxes to be regulated under the country’s existing gambling legislation. The committee made these recommendations following a series of hearings regarding the video game industry.
During the hearings, the members of the committee found that “representatives from the games industry were willfully obtuse in answering our questions about typical patterns of play.” The loot boxes in the video games were also found to be very lucrative for the gaming companies even though they came at a very high cost for problem gamblers and children. As such, in addition to having the loot boxes classified as gambling, the MPs also want children to be barred from them.
