Football has sold its soul to gambling

If it had any shame, English football would stop counting its cash for five minutes and take note. Because the reality is that football in this country has sold its soul to the gambling industry.

The influence of gambling is everywhere and we are in over our heads. Ray Winstone, the bookies' most famous front man, is as much a part of the matchday furniture now as Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher.

Football has become as inextricably associated with gambling as Formula One was with the tobacco industry in the Seventies and Eighties and that is something that should make it shudder.

Football is as in thrall to Ladbrokes, SkyBet, Bet365, Betway, Fun88 and the rest as F1 was to Philip Morris, Imperial Tobacco, Rothmans and RJ Reynolds.

You can tell yourself one industry is less harmful than the other if you want but if you do, you're missing the point. They're both toxic. They're both corrosive. There's a reason why a report published last week by the Royal Society for Public Health used the presence of bookmakers alongside fast-food outlets and tanning salons as criteria for areas with lowered life expectancy.

Football is in danger of being defined by gambling advertising now. And I might as well say this before you do: even the Football Writers' Association, of which I am a member, is sponsored by William Hill. It does not have the same potential to influence others as sponsorship of a club shirt but, yes, we're taking the money, too.

Look, I like a bet on football now and again. I kid myself I know something about it, which makes me one of the most gullible types of loser. I even went through a spell of offering spectacularly unsuccessful tips on five home wins each Saturday on my Twitter account. I stopped that a couple of years ago. You either think promoting gambling is wrong or you don't.

Gambling's message in football is seductive in its relentlessness and its ubiquity. At Stamford Bridge a fortnight ago, I sat watching Chelsea play Manchester United. Every so often, the advertising hoardings around the ground would switch and flash up a bookmaker's message. 'Download the App', 'Download the App', 'Download the App', over and over again, working its way into your brain.

Gambling on football was worth £1.4bn to bookmakers in the 12 months from October 2015 to September 2016, according to Gambling Commission data. Gambling ads appear in 95 per cent of television ad breaks during live UK football matches and researchers at Goldsmiths University found more than 250 separate gaming adverts seen on screen - mostly on shirts, hoardings and post-match interviews - during the BBC's Match of the Day.

The FA did the right thing in the summer of last year when, after they had banned Joey Barton for betting on football matches, they terminated a deal with one of their headline commercial partners, Ladbrokes. The rest of football hasn't exactly rushed to follow their lead.

Nine of the Premier League's 20 clubs have a gambling firm for a shirt sponsor. In the Championship, that figure rises to 17 out of 24 teams. And the Football League have taken the money, too: the Championship, League One and League Two all have SkyBet as a title sponsor. Gambling sponsorship in football has reached epidemic proportions.

Sport, with its associations with health and vitality, has always allowed itself to be abused by those who seek to disguise the harm their products can do and the way we have allowed our national game to gallop into gambling's shadows suggests that at a time when football clubs are richer than ever, they are also more amoral than ever.

Cloaked in its laddish badinage, gambling now has football and its followers by the throat. We have sleepwalked into a situation where its influence is all-pervasive. The game is allowing itself to be used to promote something that can ruin people's lives. Football is allowing itself to be used to snare kids and inculcate in them a habit that, in many cases, can destroy families.

According to the Gambling Commission's most recent statistics, there are 430,000 adult problem gamblers in the UK and 370,000 children aged 11 to 16 gamble each week, with 25,000 of those being classed as problem gamblers.

But football bears the responsibility for this, too. It shames it that we have to call for the Government to step in, particularly as the circumstances of Crouch's resignation suggest that the Government, too, is in the clutches of the bookmakers.

It is time football did the right thing and stopped taking the money. The clubs don't need the cash. They really don't. And yet they are willing partners in a burgeoning culture of exploitation.

'I think we are at a tipping point in terms of the relationship between professional sports and gambling,' Marc Etches, the chief executive of GambleAware, said in the summer.

'We have a generation of fans who believe you have to bet on football to enjoy it and that is disturbing and concerning. The time is now for a much-needed debate about how we do this. Watching football and having a bet is becoming normalised, but we're not talking about it.'

Maybe we'll talk about it this week because of Crouch and because it is Responsible Gambling Week. Responsible Gambling Week, of course, is a joke.

It's a device used by the gambling industry to try to stave off greater regulation by framing the debate on its own terms. Like everything in its orbit, it's an attempt to stack the odds in its favour.

If it were really interested in responsible gambling, the industry wouldn't have to wait to be forced to lower the maximum stake for the fixed odds betting terminals from £100 to £2. They'd do it themselves.

And if football were really interested in its fans, it would do the same. It would look at the out-of-control influence of gambling on our game and would see that there is only one response: enough is enough. Otherwise, football, like cigarettes, is going to have to come with a health warning.

Greed will ruin super league clubs in the end

That many of the top clubs in Europe are scheming to create a breakaway league is hardly a surprise. That greed is the driving motivational force for clubs such as Real Madrid, AC Milan and Manchester United is scarcely a shock, either.

But, if the clubs press ahead with their plans to replace the meritocracy that currently exists in European leagues with some form of super league where places are guaranteed every year for 11 teams, the surprise might actually be visited upon them.

I don’t think a super league would work for clubs in this country. They might hate to think it but the life-blood even of our biggest clubs lies in domestic rivalries built up over decades.

And we are too wedded to the idea of relegation and promotion, too opposed to the notion of a closed shop for the elite, ever to accept a league based purely on wealth.

If the elite press ahead with this, their greed will ruin them.

Lennon was brave to call out cowards

Hibs manager Neil Lennon was hit by a coin thrown by Hearts fans during the Edinburgh derby at Tynecastle last week.

A few idiots suggested Lennon had it coming because he maintains an animated touchline presence.

They’re probably the same people who think it’s OK to hurl foul abuse at a man for 90 minutes and expect him never even to look at them askance, never mind answer back.

The people who threw coins at Lennon are cowards.

He deserves all our respect for taking them on and calling them out for what they are.