There has been some recent news coverage of the possible sale of Bet365. It is a private company so its current owners, the Coates family, stand to make a considerable amount of money (in the billions) from any sale. Gambling is a lucrative industry, but also one that can cause significant harm, so it’s time to ban gambling adverts to limit how many new people are exposed to it.
It’s worth thinking about the finances in more granular detail than just one headline. If you take a few of the major gambling companies that operate in the UK you start to see a pattern. Evoke (which owns brands including William Hill, Mr Green and the 888 brands) had a revenue of £1,754.5m in 2024, up 3% from the previous year. Entain (Coral and Ladbrokes etc.) had a revenue of £5,100m, up 7%. Bet365 had a revenue of £3,696.1m, up 9%. Flutter (Betfair, Paddy Power, Sky Betting etc.) had a revenue of $14,048m (~£10,554m), up 19%.
Of course, these companies are not comparable as they range significantly in size, and revenue is not always indicative of profit and a company’s financial health. What is comparable, and rather notable, is the revenue change. All four companies have increased their revenue in 2024 year-on-year.
I’m not saying this is directly linked to adverts, nor that these companies are specifically harmful. Indeed, they’d all point to their voluntary funding of gambling harm reduction schemes and other social enterprises. But it is no wonder that companies like Bet365 are attracting attention from possible buyers, and it makes you consider why these companies are doing so well considering the state of the wider economy.
A large section of the economy from hospitality to retail is currently suffering as people have less disposable income to spend. The gambling industry presents itself as a fun pastime so you would expect it to be similarly impacted. To be making such revenue then suggests people are either addicted or turning in desperation to gambling in a misguided attempt to beat the system and make quick money.
Surely that level of revenue, relying on customers losing money, is such that they don’t need to rely on so many adverts. Individual choice should be protected, but there should be some limits if harms are significant enough. Gambling shouldn’t be banned, but the regulatory system should reflect the risks, and not put excess profit above people’s wellbeing.
I’ve also noticed that every other advert I see appears to be for gambling. From 9pm to 10pm on a Saturday night, I saw three gambling adverts, one in each advert break. I chose that time as TV gambling adverts can, normally, only be shown after 9pm, as per the Industry Group for Responsible Gambling (IGRG) Code for Socially Responsible Advertising, which gambling companies must follow.
Gambling adverts are already banned by the Gambling Act if they are aimed at under 18s. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), the regulatory body for adverts, goes further and generally bans having anyone who is, or seems to be, under 25 in or endorsing gambling adverts. So you could have a scenario in which a young actor is deemed too young to appear in the sort of adverts they are bombarded with. That rather shows the absurdity of this arbitrary cut-off.
In the last year (since May 2024) the ASA received 14 complaints relating to gambling. Of those 10 were upheld, with the company found in breach of the regulations. These cover a range of media, with many focused on social media. A number of the complaints were to do with the age of those seeing the advert, either by appealing directly to under 18s or being placed near schools. One also broke the rule on not having under 25s appear in gambling adverts.
Putting aside the arbitrary age cut off, it can create some odd situations where the appeal of the advert has to be examined if there is a complaint. One, slightly funny, example is that of a tweet by former cricketer Stuart Broad advertising the betting company Fitzdares in August 2024. The ASA ruled that the advert was permissible as Stuart Broad does not, in their judgement, strongly appeal to under 18s. I wonder how Broad felt being told he is not of interest to young people.
In terms of gambling’s wider harms, and how it impacts younger people, there have been some recent studies, such as by the Gambling Commission and Public Health Scotland. It was also debated this February in parliament. What is notable is the awareness that young people are specifically vulnerable. If you are at university, or starting out at work, you will often be separated from established support networks, and so missing the people you might normally turn to for advice or help, if your gambling becomes harmful.
You are also likely to be reliant on a good credit rating to borrow money. Spending money you can’t afford to lose is always bad, but for many young people those harms have a secondary longer-term aspect. For instance, it’s hard enough to afford to buy a house in the best of times, and so a bad credit score, which the financial harms of gambling can lead to, makes it even more unattainable.
Gambling companies are lucrative. So surely, they would cope with possible reductions in revenue if advertising were to be cut. The current restrictions, such as the ASA’s regulatory system that keeps adverts in line with the Committees of Advertising Practice’s (CAP) code, and the IGRG’s Code for Socially Responsible Advertising, which goes further than CAP, clearly are not so strict that gambling companies cannot operate under them.
If you compare gambling to other harmful industries such as tobacco, for example British American Tobacco which had a revenue of £25,867m in 2024, you can see a notable difference. Most tobacco products cannot be advertised, and even in shops are kept out of sight, and have packaging that highlights the harms, so only those already interested buy them. That leaves people with a free choice to use tobacco products or not.
Gambling adverts meanwhile are hard to avoid and highlight the idea of fun gambling with only the mandatory note on the harms. Those notes are predictably as small or brief as possible without breaching the regulations. Small white text hidden at the bottom of the screen or a rushed voice over, with the intelligibility of a tube announcement. It is hard to make a properly free choice if you do not know the harms, and are bombarded by adverts.
Gambling is so lucrative that a single family stands to make billions from it. Banning adverts might shave a few percentage points off that profitability, but that cost is surely less than the human cost of gambling. So it is time to ban gambling adverts as their harms clearly outweigh any benefits.
Words by Ed Bedford
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