Is football gambling lucrative? You bet!

£ MORE matches were fixed across more sports last year than ever before, according to a report from integrity monitoring group Sport Radar. Football is apparently worst affected but the report does not provide any specific details of suspicious events and it is believed the English game is not involved. Perhaps the most startling page of the report is Sport Radar’s estimates of how much is gambled each year on certain sports, with football leading the way with €730 BILLION in 2022. This is followed by betting on tennis (€182bn), basketball (€180bn), cricket (€67bn), NFL (€56bn), baseball (€39bn), table tennis (€39bn) and ice hockey (€32bn).

As if we did not know that football is saturated by gambling — sponsors, adverts, hoardings, matey endorsements on TV and radio, everywhere, every game — then Bet365’s most recent accounts underline it. That one firm alone had turnover up two per cent to £2.852 billion last year. Dividend payouts rose to £100m and the company’s highest-paid director, Denise Coates, had a salary of £213.4m. For the year. No one in football, not even Cristiano Ronaldo in Saudi Arabia, earns as much money annually as Coates, who is also Britain’s highest individual taxpayer.