The football economy is infected with all kinds of glorified rackets – but confronting the social parasitism of betting would be a good start. (Getty)
The house always wins, the saying goes – but not if Kylian Mbappé is in the house. The French star has broken ranks with virtually the entire football world by taking a stand against the sports betting industry.
Last week, Mbappé refused to participate in a photo shoot promoting the French national side, partly because of the national association’s relationship with betting company Betclic. (His other bugbear is fast food, and he also disdains the existing KFC partnership with Les Bleus.)
Now the association has agreed to revisit its image rights contract with Mbappé and his teammates – a step that may ultimately lead to a divorce with Betclic.
Paris St Germain’s enfant terrible now wields more economic power than any other player on earth, and he is using it properly. (Yes, he still won’t pass to Neymar, but maybe we can forgive him for that.)
Mbappé’s position is not entirely consistent, it must be said. He happens to be an investor in the NFT-based fantasy sports firm Sorare. And there is a case to be made that the fan-token sector is, ethically speaking, a kissing cousin of the sports betting sector. Both are all about technically legal hoodwinkery: selling phantom shovels in a phantom gold rush to flesh-and-blood people.
Yes, some very obsessive geeks do make money betting on football. Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, is one of those geeks, and he has applied his acute statistical brain to the task of building an excellent football club on the cheap. But Mbappé knows that such people are the needles in a towering haystack of hapless addicts and casual losers.
Winners supposedly know when to stop, but winners don’t give the sports-betting industry $100-billion a year, a sizable chunk of that extracted from Africa and the global south. That vast ocean of demand is driven by raw desperation, not by an appetite for fun and glamour as all the advertising cynically suggests. And the odds are calculated with remorseless actuarial devilry, ensuring both that the house wins on balance on any given variable in any given event, and that the individual “customer” loses over time, often just slowly enough to keep hope alive.
South African company Hollywood Bets is now a notable player in this mutant machine, operating in the UK and Ireland as well as South Africa and Mozambique. Its logo even emblazons the shirt of Premier League upstarts Brentford, and it has enlisted a string of local celebrities to back its brand.
As the French journalist Philippe Auclair has pointed out, the entire ecosystem of football observes a kind of omerta about the sport’s bone-deep infection with betting money – because so many clubs and broadcasters and media companies are directly or indirectly dependent on that money. Everybody is in too deep to ask questions.
To be fair, online gambling is just the most overt expression of a global casino economy that has defined the last four decades: a casino that has undone the post-war decades’ significant progress towards economic quality in the West. Football happens to hold a particularly faithful mirror to the vortex of financialisation: watch a halftime ad break of an English Premier League broadcast in South Africa, for example, and the only tangible products you will be sold are beer and vodka. Everything else is a rash of high-concept robberies dressed up as services: sports betting, insurance, loyalty schemes, banking. The real money these days is in extraction, not production.
Mbappé’s wealth and attendant clout is based on a different and equally dangerous kind of extraction, of course: Gulf oil, which gushes through the financial plumbing of his mighty club. He is no saint. But if he uses the power of one racket to puncture another racket, then he might just be balancing his ethical books.