The tense relationship between sports betting and football institutions already has “beards”. Between advances and retreats and the passage from non-existent regulations to strict rules, bookmakers had to wait years to make their way into Portuguese football.
But it seems that this path is opened from the season that kicked-off last Friday. The I Liga will be called “Liga Bwin” until 2025/26, which is, from the outset, an impossible calling card to ignore. Once the door was open, the bookmakers rushed into football clubs as well.
Sporting and Marítimo players will display Betano's name week after week, while Betway (Belenenses SAD), Placard (Vitória, Moreirense, Boavista and Famalicão) and Solverde (Estoril, Santa Clara and Paços de Ferreira) will be sponsors top of the jerseys of other eight clubs in the I League. More than half of the top division clubs will display bookmakers on I League matches.
This is a scenario that comes from the post-2015 regulation, the year in which several bookmakers had to stop their activity in Portugal after having given, in the first ten years of this century, a strong commercial base to national football.
After recovering the licenses and given time for the end of the sponsorships, which had already been contracted, the bookmakers were able to start "attacking" again the clubs of the I League. And they do it in strength.
For clubs, these sponsorships are, in theory, good news. And for football in general and the fight against match-fixing in particular? Marcelo Moriconi, ISCTE researcher, tells PÚBLICO that he doesn't see this phenomenon as a problem because of the unethical relationships that can put clubs in the hands of betting companies, but more because of the social and economic problem that this dependence can bring.
“I don't think there is an ethical problem per se. Of course, the conflict of interest worries me, but speaking specifically about this match-fixing issue, I don't think this is a problem of players getting any easier to corrupt. Sponsorship alone does not make clubs or athletes more manipulable. And I even believe that the clubs want to try to escape these schemes, in order to protect these companies that pay them so much,” he points out.
And this is the main point: pay. For Marcelo Moriconi, an expert on integrity and corruption in sports, clubs accept sponsorship from bookmakers “because they are the ones who give the most money” and they have to esteem well these sources of income.
“Due to the economic situation of the clubs, many with authentic financial holes, the bookmakers arrive with money and no one can say no,” he argues, to explain why Portugal appears in a countercycle compared to countries like England or Spain, increasingly committed to keeping bookmakers away from club jerseys.
Therefore, there is not an ethical problem per se, but a social problem: “For me, the problem is the dependence of the economic part. The question we must ask is whether football is an activity to be sold to customers or whether it is a sport. In the European Superliga, for example, that was a bit of what it was about. Many countries prohibit these sponsorships because of the social problem that is created. Basically, sport ends up trying to win over the younger generations through the appeal to bets.”
More than a direct invitation to match-fixing, these sponsorships will indeed be a “web” for the youngest, whose addition to the game is a pressing struggle.
Source: Publico PT
