Daily Mail, Thursday, August 8, 2019 Page 15
QQQseeking new ways to intensify
their appeal. Even the ‘health
warnings’ are cynically aimed at
boosting takings.
Consider the best-known of
the ‘gambling awareness’
slogans...‘When the fun stops,
Stop!’ That word ‘FUN’ is writ-
ten much larger than the
rest of the message, and it is
decorated with Las Vegas lights.
The subliminal message is:
‘Gambling is fun!’B
ETTiNG firms are trying
to outdo each other, the
way cigarette advertisers
used to before the clamp-
down on tobacco products. And
if gambling companies are now
part sponsors of player deals,
their hold over clubs must be
stronger than ever. Derby
County should be thinking of
their vulnerable young fans, not
the money.
i was 16, barely more than a
child, when i started putting
bets on football matches. Grow-
ing up in a Norfolk town, i loved
the game, and i believed the ads
that said: ‘The result matters
more when there’s money on it.’
it seemed a cool way to increase
the enjoyment i already had in
the game.
This was in the mid-Noughties
before the mood started to
change. i could bet as much as i
wanted, without limit... whether
i could afford to or not.
Very quickly the idea of win-
ning a bit of cash was completely
outweighed by the buzz of bet-
ting. Win or lose, i was hooked.
That went on for six or seven
years as i became a helpless
addict. i didn’t see myself that
way, of course: to me, a gambler
was an older man, hunched over
a fruit machine with a cigarette
in his mouth. i was nothing like
that – i was working, i had
friends and loving parents, i was
bright and popular. i was also
completely in denial.
Then in 2013 my family was
struck by the most appalling
tragedy. My 50-year-old father
Richard, a car dealer, was
involved in a car crash with adrunk driver. Though my dad
was not to blame in any way, it
was horrific: a baby in the other
car was killed. Worse still was to
come, when a routine scan
in A&E revealed a tumour on
Dad’s pancreas. He died six
weeks later.
i came home from university to
help my mother, Janice, but i
was completely unable to cope
with the onslaught of emotions.
My father had been my best
friend. Addiction was my escape.
i realised it was easier to face
losing £500 on a football game,
no matter how deeply in debt i
already was, than to deal with
the nightmare of grief that over-
shadowed my family.
i don’t feel my story is uncom-
mon. There are an estimated
400,000 problem gamblers in the
UK, a high proportion of them
young men. Betting is an over-
whelming addiction – classified
by psychiatrists as such in 2013.
it can transport you to a differ-
ent world where all reality
is bypassed.
As my addiction spiralled, the
costs piled up. And the financial
price, though very significant,
was the least of them. i was
never in a well-paid job, yet i
was able to rack up losses of at
least £100,000. Losing didn’t
matter – it was just an excuse to
keep gambling.
To feed the habit, i lied, i bor-
rowed and i took out a long
series of pay day loans, 20 of
them, at exorbitant interest.
Mum could see i had a seriousproblem but neither of us knew
how to address it, when i
wouldn’t even admit there was
anything wrong.
The final crisis came on my
28th birthday last year, when i
gambled away £2,000 on fixed
odds betting terminals.
i was supposed to be in work
but i went home and shut myself
in my room to cry. i stayed in
there for three days, barely
eating. i wasn’t suicidal,
but i knew i couldn’t live like
this any more.T
HAT was the last day i
ever put a bet on. i forced
myself to be honest about
my addiction, first with my
Mum and then with my employer,
friends and family. i’ve been
clean for 18 months now, and
i’ve thrown myself into the char-
ity project The Big Step, part of
Gambling With Lives, a charity
started by parents bereaved by
gambling-related suicide.
Together we are working to urge
the football world to rethink its
relationship with the gambling
industry that exploits it.
i’ve heard from a lot of parents
who have lost children to gam-
bling addiction. Their stories are
harrowing and heartbreaking,
and they deserve to be heard. i’d
like to see the betting business
reformed, with warnings as
prominent as the photographs
on cigarette packets.
People need to understand
that gambling costs lives. i
thought we were getting the
message across, to football clubs
as well as fans. Perhaps naively,
i believed a cultural shift was
afoot and that society would
cease to see betting as glamor-
ous, as smart, as laddish, as
brave. Wayne Rooney has just
made that very much harder.James Grimes is the founder of
the Big Step charity project,
which walks and talks football
clubs through the dangers of
gambling to protect the next
generation of fans.savages
firm deal
OWN GOAL
THAT’S THE
HEIGHT OF
CYNICISM
his £700k gambling debts ‘stupid’
he started losing he kept going in a
bid to recoup his losses, with little
idea how much he had actually lost.
His £700,000 gambling debts were
eventually revealed in the Press,
and Rooney said it had come as a
wake-up call. In his 2006 memoir, My
Story So Far, he wrote: ‘In a way I’m
glad it did all come out. It shocked
me into realising how much I’d been
betting, and losing, and made meaware of just how stupid I had been.’
Rooney, 33, began ‘proper gam-
bling’ on horse racing, dog racing or
other football teams’ matches dur-
ing his second year at Everton.
He said: ‘When [wife] Coleen found
out she was furious. I said I would
give up, which I did.’ His astonishing
wages meant he could pay his debts
and he has always insisted gambling
was ‘a bit of fun to pass the time’.Fun: Wife Coleen and son Kit after the family’s return to UK from the USPicture: SPLASH NEWSBUT AT LEAST HIS FAMILY
ARE PLEASED HE’S HOME
From a former gambling
addict who lost £100k...
W
AyNE Rooney’s deci-
sion to accept a
£7.8million deal to
promote a betting
company on his
football shirt is a kick in the
teeth for hundreds of thou-
sands of gambling addicts,
and recovering addicts – like
me – in Britain.
Even worse, it is cynical and
irresponsible behaviour that
puts his own young fans at great-
est risk.
As the father of four boys and a
man who has admitted in the past to
his own problems with gambling,
Rooney’s actions by agreeing to pro-
mote online casino 32Red seem to
me the height of hypocrisy.
No matter how reckless he may
have been with his money in the
past, Rooney – a former England
captain who is his country’s record
goal-scorer – is a millionaire many
times over.
He cannot need this deal to shore
up his own finances.
Some in-roads have been made in
recent years to rein back rampant
football-associated advertising by
betting companies: for instance,
they are not allowed to put their
logos on football shirts bought
by children.
But why would they worry! young-
sters will be clamouring to buy rep-
lica shirts bearing Rooney’s name
and new number – 32 – following
his surprise move back to the UK
from Washington DC, to join Derby
County as player-coach in January.
yet the advertisements around
gambling do colossal damage to
young minds, and the companies
that profit from them are alwaysBy James
Grimes
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