FOR DARRAGH McGEE, the moment he realised that things had changed was on a trip back home to Donegal after completing his PhD in Canada.
He and a friend had headed into Letterkenny to watch a Manchester United game on the big screen. But during the game, Darragh noticed his companion was preoccupied by events happening on another, small television in the corner of the bar showing a different game.
He asked what was up, and it turned out his friend had a juicy bet riding on the other match. That’s when it really clicked with McGee that betting and gambling had become more of an attraction for some than the game itself.
It led to some intense reflection and observation. Every time he watched sports, he noticed the way gambling would dominate the advertising breaks, and, in time, the jersey sponsors of the teams.
He spent 10 years researching and then writing ‘Imitation Games – How Gambling Hijacked Sport.’ It is an exhaustive look at how light-touch government policy, some ingenious marketing and manipulation has led to gambling consuming modern sport, and the misery it has inflicted upon society while dressing up as a somewhat rakish hobby, nothing more than another branch of light entertainment.
Gibraltar prison
The book opens with the tale of James. A man trapped in his own prison of gambling, living in Gibraltar.
Just a few years earlier, James was a person of real promise, with a youth coaching business and a passion for sport. All of that went as his gambling habit grew. At one stage he went to Las Vegas and fed €4,000 into an Elton John-themed slot machine within hours, having to spend the next five days penniless.
Darragh McGee, author.
McGee details James’ last days of his Gibraltar nightmare, sleeping in the business premises he had founded along with friends before stealing cash to keep his gambling habit up. Even when those around him found him in such reduced circumstances, he went home and kept gambling.
He felt that suicide was the only way out.
But James Grimes didn’t do that. Instead, James would later go on to get help and enter recovery. In time, he founded a walk, ‘The Big Step’ that would travel from Manchester City’s stadium, past several other grounds in the north of England that had gambling companies as jersey sponsors, to raise awareness of gambling addiction.
Not everyone was like James Grimes. Some ended up dying by suicide.
In the Gtech
After the opening chapter, the action moves to a meeting between Brentford and Nottingham Forest on 20 January 2024 at the Gtech Community Stadium.
As they emerge for the game, Brentford are wearing a jersey adorned with a gambling company sponsor. So too are Forest. All around pitch side LED advertising boards, Hollywood Bets moves into a message from Bet365, that then gives way for Betway.
A goal flies in after three minutes. After the obligatory ‘limbs’, a curiously modern phenomenon as hundreds of fans stare at their phones, all studying and adjusting their in-game bets.
In a corporate box is Brentford’s owner, Matthew Benham, a man who made his fortune as proprietor of SmartOdds.
Ivan Toney, wearing a Brentford jersey with 'Hollywood Bets' across the chest. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Back on the pitch is Ivan Toney, who is making his first appearance in eight months after serving a ban for having placed 232 bets on games. 29 of them involved teams he was registered with. 15 backed himself to score.
On the bench for Forest is Harry Toffolo. He is suspended after having been found placing 375 bets, including 15 against his own team.
It is lurid imagery that McGee has pieced together to display that, no matter where you look when you watch a game of Premier League soccer, you are being assailed by gambling.
The further you go into the book, to read of the manipulation, the tricks all accelerated through technological advances, you realise there is a generation who are falling into the trap.
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Sobering
You suspect it’s not going to be a bestseller. While McGee is aware of that, he didn’t set out with that as a plan. It’s a sobering read.
“The book was ten years in the making and about five years in the writing. My wife would say nearly a divorce in the writing as well,” he says, half-jokingly.
“We have had two children over the course of the journey so it has been a hard slog.
“But I was very clear that you only get one chance to write that book because the industry are at your door.
“They talk about purpose in life and I had grown increasingly frustrated by what it takes to research sports gambling today.”
So much of the ‘research’ into gambling now is funded by the very industry it is meant to be researching.
“I was horrified by the industry but also fascinated by it and I suppose that’s where the intellect comes in,” says McGee.
“I found Paddy Power’s marketing, for instance, fascinating. I wanted to understand. Eventually, I would hear it from the horses’ mouth. Stewart Kenny was interviewed multiple times and to pin him down and get him to confirm the things I was seeing…
“Which actively attempted to offend and outrage many if it helped them make their target audience laugh. That target audience was a new generation of young men.
“I was very clear that you had to acknowledge the dark genius of the industry across 400 pages.
“There are moments where, the more time I spent with bereaved parents, children are the worst.”
He recounts one of the ‘Big Step’ walks he went on with James Grimes during the writing of the book. He met a little boy whose father had committed suicide after running up gambling debts.
He used to go along to watch Leicester City with his father. His mother felt they should keep up the tradition, but after a couple of games, she felt she was being trolled by all the gambling advertising.
It’s not that football is unaware of all of this. At the start of the present season, gambling firms were no longer permitted to be the main shirt sponsor, though some have retained gambling of crypto-casino brands on their sleeves, such as Aston Villa, Everton and Bournemouth.
Still, you put it to McGee that the culture is so ingrained that football clubs are never going to turn away the easy sponsorship visible practically everywhere else.
Passive
“I wholly disagree with you,” he says.
“I think it is too easy for people to grant them a passive role in all of this.
“That’s the other thing I was crystal clear about in this book. I wasn’t just taking aim at the gambling industry, the gambling industry is a known addictive industry that has always profited from people’s suffering.
Darragh McGee (right) at his book launch.
“I hear that notion quite often; that it’s gone too deep now. Sport should be held accountable. But the truth is, one single intervention by a government that adopts a public health approach, as we see around the world now – so the thing to say is that there is precedent now.
“You can reverse this. Suddenly, we know that gambling is the new tobacco. And once upon a time, tobacco brands were all over sport. They were everywhere and there came a moment, as said by the American writer Steven Pinker, ‘The moment that we all know that we all know.’
“We’re here with gambling. We all know that this is harming communities, individuals, societies. We know that this is ultimately an extractive industry that is powered by big tech, social media, algorithms that are able to aggregate information on teenagers and target them on a level.
“Why is it that we have this lag with the gambling industry? In the big picture, we are overdue this societal reckoning with gambling.” Since writing the book, he can’t help seeing the product placement pivoting and roping in those that you felt might have been above it all.
Roy’s punt
Such as Roy Keane and his advertisements for SkyBet, where he plays on the caricature of the man who maintains ‘the game’s gone.’ With the new ad, he maintain’s ‘The games’ back.’
“We should ask more of sports stars, who are role models. To use an academic term, they have a profound epistemic power. And what that relates to is their ability to influence what a population thinks of a particular issue or in this case, an industry and a set of products that we know are deeply harmful for a new generation.
Roy Keane, who has made advertisements for SkyBet recently. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
“He has allowed the transfer of the social and cultural trust in him, he’s allowing the transfer of that to sell an industry.”
He continues, “The UK loves Roy Keane. He sells Sky on any given weekend and he’s allowed this blurring of lines between his role as a pundit and his role as the face of SkyBet now.
“He’s blurred the lines of what he knows and says as a pundit, versus lending his image to promote what we know is a dangerous industry.
“We should ask a lot more of him for that. He’s legitimising other members of his generation to do the same thing.
“Roy Keane doing it allows others to think it is appropriate. And if they were asked to endorse tobacco in the morning, they would know to say, ‘no.’
“It won’t age well for them. He’s on the wrong side of history and public health here.”
Talking about football is one thing, but it’s child’s play to where the industry wants to take you, as McGee explains.
“If there is one thing to understand, it is that sports gambling is the road in for young people, young sports fans and young men disproportionately among them. And what the gambling companies do once you register with them and download the app, is they in due course offer you a harmless bet on the outcome of say a World Cup game, to in-play betting.
Casino play
“So you will get offers of in-play, which is potentially the most innovative product of the last 100 years, using everything that a Las Vegas slot machine was.
We then get into really dangerous waters. “You cross a firewall. It used to be a physical and geographical firewall to being in a casino. Now it’s online and you are playing the most addictive games on earth. And there’s no barrier. It’s 24/7, it’s faceless and frictionless.
“As a society, we don’t understand that pathway well enough.
“And that is the business model of the industry today. Of virtually every gambling firm out there today. To move you from sports betting to the online casino.”
He continues his work in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Bath, but gambling is something he is continually monitoring.
“There’s not a month goes by now where there is not a lawsuit that is not filed against a social media company,” he says.
“The relationship between sporting actors and gambling firms has got to the point now where it is much like social media.
“We need proper public health attention on this.
“The thing I had to make peace with is the quantum of harm will continue to deepen before Governments are moved to action because political will is always directly correlated with the will of the people. Until Governments are properly pushed to regulate this industry, much like tobacco, then it will continue.”
****
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'You had to acknowledge the dark genius of the industry'
FOR DARRAGH McGEE, the moment he realised that things had changed was on a trip back home to Donegal after completing his PhD in Canada.
He and a friend had headed into Letterkenny to watch a Manchester United game on the big screen. But during the game, Darragh noticed his companion was preoccupied by events happening on another, small television in the corner of the bar showing a different game.
He asked what was up, and it turned out his friend had a juicy bet riding on the other match. That’s when it really clicked with McGee that betting and gambling had become more of an attraction for some than the game itself.
It led to some intense reflection and observation. Every time he watched sports, he noticed the way gambling would dominate the advertising breaks, and, in time, the jersey sponsors of the teams.
He spent 10 years researching and then writing ‘Imitation Games – How Gambling Hijacked Sport.’ It is an exhaustive look at how light-touch government policy, some ingenious marketing and manipulation has led to gambling consuming modern sport, and the misery it has inflicted upon society while dressing up as a somewhat rakish hobby, nothing more than another branch of light entertainment.
Gibraltar prison
The book opens with the tale of James. A man trapped in his own prison of gambling, living in Gibraltar.
Just a few years earlier, James was a person of real promise, with a youth coaching business and a passion for sport. All of that went as his gambling habit grew. At one stage he went to Las Vegas and fed €4,000 into an Elton John-themed slot machine within hours, having to spend the next five days penniless.
McGee details James’ last days of his Gibraltar nightmare, sleeping in the business premises he had founded along with friends before stealing cash to keep his gambling habit up. Even when those around him found him in such reduced circumstances, he went home and kept gambling.
He felt that suicide was the only way out.
But James Grimes didn’t do that. Instead, James would later go on to get help and enter recovery. In time, he founded a walk, ‘The Big Step’ that would travel from Manchester City’s stadium, past several other grounds in the north of England that had gambling companies as jersey sponsors, to raise awareness of gambling addiction.
Not everyone was like James Grimes. Some ended up dying by suicide.
In the Gtech
After the opening chapter, the action moves to a meeting between Brentford and Nottingham Forest on 20 January 2024 at the Gtech Community Stadium.
As they emerge for the game, Brentford are wearing a jersey adorned with a gambling company sponsor. So too are Forest. All around pitch side LED advertising boards, Hollywood Bets moves into a message from Bet365, that then gives way for Betway.
A goal flies in after three minutes. After the obligatory ‘limbs’, a curiously modern phenomenon as hundreds of fans stare at their phones, all studying and adjusting their in-game bets.
In a corporate box is Brentford’s owner, Matthew Benham, a man who made his fortune as proprietor of SmartOdds.
Back on the pitch is Ivan Toney, who is making his first appearance in eight months after serving a ban for having placed 232 bets on games. 29 of them involved teams he was registered with. 15 backed himself to score.
On the bench for Forest is Harry Toffolo. He is suspended after having been found placing 375 bets, including 15 against his own team.
It is lurid imagery that McGee has pieced together to display that, no matter where you look when you watch a game of Premier League soccer, you are being assailed by gambling.
The further you go into the book, to read of the manipulation, the tricks all accelerated through technological advances, you realise there is a generation who are falling into the trap.
Sobering
You suspect it’s not going to be a bestseller. While McGee is aware of that, he didn’t set out with that as a plan. It’s a sobering read.
“The book was ten years in the making and about five years in the writing. My wife would say nearly a divorce in the writing as well,” he says, half-jokingly.
“We have had two children over the course of the journey so it has been a hard slog.
“But I was very clear that you only get one chance to write that book because the industry are at your door.
“They talk about purpose in life and I had grown increasingly frustrated by what it takes to research sports gambling today.”
So much of the ‘research’ into gambling now is funded by the very industry it is meant to be researching.
“I was horrified by the industry but also fascinated by it and I suppose that’s where the intellect comes in,” says McGee.
“I found Paddy Power’s marketing, for instance, fascinating. I wanted to understand. Eventually, I would hear it from the horses’ mouth. Stewart Kenny was interviewed multiple times and to pin him down and get him to confirm the things I was seeing…
“Which actively attempted to offend and outrage many if it helped them make their target audience laugh. That target audience was a new generation of young men.
“There are moments where, the more time I spent with bereaved parents, children are the worst.”
He recounts one of the ‘Big Step’ walks he went on with James Grimes during the writing of the book. He met a little boy whose father had committed suicide after running up gambling debts.
He used to go along to watch Leicester City with his father. His mother felt they should keep up the tradition, but after a couple of games, she felt she was being trolled by all the gambling advertising.
It’s not that football is unaware of all of this. At the start of the present season, gambling firms were no longer permitted to be the main shirt sponsor, though some have retained gambling of crypto-casino brands on their sleeves, such as Aston Villa, Everton and Bournemouth.
Still, you put it to McGee that the culture is so ingrained that football clubs are never going to turn away the easy sponsorship visible practically everywhere else.
Passive
“I wholly disagree with you,” he says.
“I think it is too easy for people to grant them a passive role in all of this.
“That’s the other thing I was crystal clear about in this book. I wasn’t just taking aim at the gambling industry, the gambling industry is a known addictive industry that has always profited from people’s suffering.
“I hear that notion quite often; that it’s gone too deep now. Sport should be held accountable. But the truth is, one single intervention by a government that adopts a public health approach, as we see around the world now – so the thing to say is that there is precedent now.
“You can reverse this. Suddenly, we know that gambling is the new tobacco. And once upon a time, tobacco brands were all over sport. They were everywhere and there came a moment, as said by the American writer Steven Pinker, ‘The moment that we all know that we all know.’
“We’re here with gambling. We all know that this is harming communities, individuals, societies. We know that this is ultimately an extractive industry that is powered by big tech, social media, algorithms that are able to aggregate information on teenagers and target them on a level.
“Why is it that we have this lag with the gambling industry? In the big picture, we are overdue this societal reckoning with gambling.” Since writing the book, he can’t help seeing the product placement pivoting and roping in those that you felt might have been above it all.
Roy’s punt
Such as Roy Keane and his advertisements for SkyBet, where he plays on the caricature of the man who maintains ‘the game’s gone.’ With the new ad, he maintain’s ‘The games’ back.’
“We should ask more of sports stars, who are role models. To use an academic term, they have a profound epistemic power. And what that relates to is their ability to influence what a population thinks of a particular issue or in this case, an industry and a set of products that we know are deeply harmful for a new generation.
“He has allowed the transfer of the social and cultural trust in him, he’s allowing the transfer of that to sell an industry.”
He continues, “The UK loves Roy Keane. He sells Sky on any given weekend and he’s allowed this blurring of lines between his role as a pundit and his role as the face of SkyBet now.
“He’s blurred the lines of what he knows and says as a pundit, versus lending his image to promote what we know is a dangerous industry.
“We should ask a lot more of him for that. He’s legitimising other members of his generation to do the same thing.
“It won’t age well for them. He’s on the wrong side of history and public health here.”
Talking about football is one thing, but it’s child’s play to where the industry wants to take you, as McGee explains.
“If there is one thing to understand, it is that sports gambling is the road in for young people, young sports fans and young men disproportionately among them. And what the gambling companies do once you register with them and download the app, is they in due course offer you a harmless bet on the outcome of say a World Cup game, to in-play betting.
Casino play
“So you will get offers of in-play, which is potentially the most innovative product of the last 100 years, using everything that a Las Vegas slot machine was.
We then get into really dangerous waters. “You cross a firewall. It used to be a physical and geographical firewall to being in a casino. Now it’s online and you are playing the most addictive games on earth. And there’s no barrier. It’s 24/7, it’s faceless and frictionless.
“As a society, we don’t understand that pathway well enough.
He continues his work in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Bath, but gambling is something he is continually monitoring.
“There’s not a month goes by now where there is not a lawsuit that is not filed against a social media company,” he says.
“The relationship between sporting actors and gambling firms has got to the point now where it is much like social media.
“We need proper public health attention on this.
“The thing I had to make peace with is the quantum of harm will continue to deepen before Governments are moved to action because political will is always directly correlated with the will of the people. Until Governments are properly pushed to regulate this industry, much like tobacco, then it will continue.”
****
If you or someone you know has been affected by gambling issues, confidential support and free resources are available right now.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
book Darragh McGee Gambling Imitation games none