Nottingham Forest, you suspect, will have been following the performances of Brentford’s reserve side with a degree of trepidation. There was a 2-2 draw in a friendly against Como and then, last Saturday, a 5-1 win over Southampton Under-23s.
Ivan Toney scored in the first and got a hat-trick in the second. B-team football is not the Premier League but the suggestion is that the England striker is in form and ready for his comeback from an eight-month suspension for breaching gambling regulations.
Forest could feel the fixture calendar has been a little unkind to them. If they had landed in the other half of the winter break and played the fixture this weekend, Toney would not have been available. And this is a fairly crucial game: a six-pointer for sides looking a little anxiously over their shoulders and wondering whether Luton are better than everybody thought. Why couldn’t they have played an injury-ravaged Brentford who have lost five in a row in the league this weekend?
But that is to treat Toney’s return as a sporting issue – which it is, but it is also about something far more significant. The reaction when Toney was banned seemed generally sympathetic, as it should be for an addict, apparently reflecting a more general unease about the prevalence of gambling within football.
People will take different moral positions but, in the UK, sports betting is legal. A lot of people enjoy gambling and, for many, sports such as horse racing and greyhound racing are unimaginable without it. Some people suffer crippling addiction and they deserve support, but just as the existence of alcoholics does not lead to serious calls for a blanket ban on booze, so the presence of gambling addicts should not lead to a blanket ban on betting.
Quite apart from anything else, history suggests betting is impossible to ban, that it will go on in the face of legislation against it – and it is not legitimate bookmakers who fix matches or send somebody round to break the fingers of debtors.
In a competition that draws as much gambling as the Premier League, betting, paradoxically, serves as a safeguard against fixing. Bookmakers have their margins and they make money if the sport is fair. Their algorithms recognise suspicious patterns and trigger warnings accordingly, which is what led to the investigation into Oxford United’s FA Cup tie against Arsenal a year ago after unusual amounts of money were placed on a particular player to be booked, although ultimately the FA took no action.
But that is not to say that everything is fine around betting and football. Numerous investigations have uncovered bookmakers who deliberately target vulnerable individuals, in effect fostering addictions. The instances of dubious foreign betting firms sponsoring clubs via registration in the Isle of Man are a clear problem.
Then there are issues around advertising. Particularly given how easy it is to bet online or via an app, an addict should be able to watch sport without constantly being prodded to have a flutter; nobody would think it a good idea to wave an open bottle of whisky under the nose of an alcoholic a couple of times a week. Restrictions on sponsorship, television advertising in the immediate buildup and visible advertising during games would seem reasonable.
Whether that would fall under the remit of the proposed football regulator, the Football Association or the Gambling Commission, it is something that requires urgent attention. But that does not absolve players of responsibility. If football is to have an open, regulated relationship with gambling, there has to be strict liability – and that means lengthy bans for footballers caught placing bets. Most professions – even journalism – have their codes of conduct; this is just part of football’s – and has been for some time.
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Toney’s lawyers claimed that it had only been when he had joined Brentford in September 2020 and seen a video that the forward had realised he might be in trouble. Although, given his cousin was charged with a breach of the gambling regulations in 2017 and he admitted remembering the FA explaining the rules when he was at Peterborough, the commission that imposed the ban concluded he had been aware of the regulations. Either way, his case should serve as a reminder to players and clubs of just how important these regulations are, not just for the integrity of the game but for the perception of integrity.
Whether Toney recognises that is another matter. His complaints about the timing of his case and the length of his ban rub uneasily against his insistence that a lesson has been learned and that he takes full responsibility. It also sits alongside the two occasions when he was recorded being dismissive of Brentford to create a less than flattering image of entitlement.
Toney has, at least, spoken of his gratitude at the way Brentford have stood by him as he has served his ban, the strong implication of which is that he is not planning to move this month. Given that his contract is up in June 2025, it may be different in the summer but it would seem profoundly ungrateful to take eight months of wages while unavailable because of his own actions then to jump ship immediately when available to play again.
Which is good news for Brentford, who were having a reasonable season until Bryan Mbeumo was injured against Brighton in the first of those five successive defeats, leaving them with a dearth of attacking options. But is probably less good news for Arsenal and Chelsea, two sides seemingly in want of a centre-forward with proven record of scoring goals in the Premier League who may, just about, have been able to find the wriggle room within profit and sustainability regulations to afford him. Brentford’s need in the second half of this season, the potential financial repercussions of relegation, will anyway have pushed his price to levels that are almost certainly not worth paying.
And there we go again, inevitably circling back to what this means on the pitch and what that means for the balance sheet. Toney’s is a football story, but it is also about far broader issues of how football interacts with the wider world.
