FOOTBALL AND GAMBLING

Gambling is often now a generally acceptable and widely acceptable element of twenty-first century culture. A major element of this is football betting, with its long traditions, the explosion of football programming on terrestrial and satellite television, and the simultaneous updates of scores on mobile phones. But although football betting is touched on in general studies of gambling (e.g. Munting, 1996; Reith, 1999; Sproston, Erens and Orford, 2000; Miers, 2004) or sport economics (Forrest, 2009), academic studies of the complex interrelationships over time between football and gambling are relatively few, largely focusing on the pools (Fishwick, 1989: 117-35; Clapson, 1992: 162-86; Laybourne, 2007: 151-66).