Since the NRL integrity unit revealed it was investigating allegations the Wests Tigers’ Tim Simona bet on a game in which he was playing in 2016 NRL CEO Todd Greenberg has been forced to defend the code’s commercial links to gambling more times than he would have liked. Despite all the practice he has been getting, he has been far from convincing.
The NRL, Greenberg has emphasised, has a campaign against in-house gambling and corruption – a campaign, don’t you know, that includes accepting $60m sponsorship from Sportsbet (not including a percentage of turnover) and allowing advertising of the online bookmaker’s branding, odds and betting options on NRL broadcasts, websites and social media.
It’s a strange kind of campaign against something that embraces that something so wholeheartedly.
That roaring, stamping, defecating elephant in the room aside, Greenberg has previously warned that players caught betting on games or match-fixing face life bans from the sport, and it has been revealed that late last year the NRL prohibited bookmakers from offering bets on Under-20s matches, and that integrity unit boss Nick Weeks visited all 16 NRL clubs and urged players to delete betting apps on their phones in order to distance themselves from temptation.
More recently the NRL has prohibited a number of exotic betting options as they are ripe for exploitation, including head-to-head player bets, most runs, most metres, most tackles, and the number of 40-20s kicked in matches.
The NRL likes to think that such actions show how serious they are about stamping out corruption and protecting the integrity of their code, but don’t they also emphasise how slippery and multi-headed a threat gambling is to sport, and how demented it was for the NRL – like the AFL, ARU, Cricket Australia and Football Federation Australia – to have invited the gambling industry into its bed? It’s like asking Freddy Krueger in to see your etchings one night and thinking you’ll be safe as long as you put corks on the ends of the glinting blades attached to his bespoke right glove.
Ah, but it’s all about striking a balance, Greenberg says, between the sport’s integrity and catering to all those punters who, we’re meant to believe, without the NRL’s partnership with Sportsbet, would struggle to place a wager on rugby league.
And having a punt, we’re constantly reminded – particularly by those with most to gain from the stereotype; those like James Packer, the TAB and Tattersalls – is as Australian a pastime as shooing flies, taking sickies, crushing tinnies and driving a mob of wild brumbies down a flaming precipice; standard activities for most Australians. “People, particularly in this country, they love to have a bet,” Greenberg told ABC News 24 recently. “And we’re not going to get away from that. So whether or not we have branding, people are still going to be looking to have a wager on the game.”
That’s true enough, but why should the NRL have anything to do with it, apart from the money that is? Greenberg overlooks the fact that the NRL is not simply catering to a particular want, it is actively promoting it which, the gambling industry no doubt hopes, will create further want.
Yes, the situation has improved since recent times when NRL viewers had to regularly endure Channel Nine commentators crossing mid-call to bookmaker Tom Waterhouse. But sport is still wallowing in the mud. By partnering with gambling bodies, by stringing up gambling bunting around sporting broadcasts – which, it seems to me, fans all but unanimously loathe – our leading sporting codes are not only putting themselves in a compromising position the next time one of their players has a bet and the result of a game is called into question (and there will always be a next time), they’re also glamourising and normalising a potentially damaging pastime.
Gambling ads famously conclude with the throw-away warning “bet responsibly” – a warning that, if turned into a meme, would look like a cheeky, knowing wink – but gambling, like smoking and drug taking, can be difficult to do in moderation for many people and it will continue to cause damage to individuals, families and communities, never mind damage the integrity of sport and our relationship with it.
As anti-gambling crusader Tim Costello told the Monthly magazine in 2011, “While gambling is a part of life, there’s a vice dimension that drops, compromises and changes what should be family and children’s passions. To literally hand it over to gambling organisations is a profound shift in what sport has previously been about.”
In the debate about gambling sponsorship or sport there are, as has been pointed out, parallels with the tobacco industry’s former sponsorship of sport. It took a long battle, and legislation, to end that troubling association. It may take a similar battle to end the one between sport and their gambling sponsors.
Unless, of course, our leading sporting bodies one day decide for themselves that the costs outweigh the benefits. I wouldn’t advise betting on that but if you do, as always, bet responsibly.
