For as long as the sport of football has been around, placing wagers on the players has been a popular pastime.
The earliest football pools were thought to have been offered at Old Trafford all the way back in the 1800s, while the world’s first piece of football betting legislation, the English Ready Money Football Betting Act, was brought into law in 1920 – over a century ago.
However, few people back then could have predicted just how ubiquitous sports betting would become, and how it would go on to change football itself.
Read on to find out how football betting has changed the game, and hows the 2020 Euros demonstrate this.
Fans shift their focus
One of the most obvious ways that betting has influenced how we engage with football concerns what we are actually paying attention to. For many fans, the outright winner of a match is often just one of many considerations, especially if they are placing multiplier or accumulator bets.
For example, if you’re betting on Italy v England in the Euros final this weekend, you might also wager on who will score the first goal, how many yellow cards will be awarded, which team gets the most penalties, and so on. Thanks to the huge range of wagering options offered by sports betting platforms, fans are now focusing on more aspects of the game than ever before.
Betting more visible than ever
Another major way that betting has reshaped football is clear just by observing how ubiquitous sports betting actually is in the sport. Sports betting platforms sponsor eight clubs in the English Premier League, including Newcastle United, Leeds, Crystal Palace, and the Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Meanwhile, the Euros have already seen huge amounts of betting sponsorships and advertising take place across the tournament (albeit less than in previous years). Betting and major football competitions are natural tie-ins, so it only makes sense that the sports betting industry would become a major sponsor and financial guarantor for European football.
A truly global pastime
Equally important is how football betting platforms have expanded the reach of leagues and teams that were once strictly local in their focus and outlook. Many of the world’s top gambling platforms serve international markets, which means that the way they market, say, the English Premier League or the Euros, tends to be internationally focused.
Many of the betting adverts on player strips are often written in Mandarin or Cantonese as a means of engaging audiences that speak those languages. Some of the largest platforms offer betting on the Euros on virtually every continent, bringing the sport to entirely new audiences and lifting football’s global outlook to an entirely new level.
These are just some of the important ways that the pastime of sports betting is continuing to influence the sport of football itself and how we all engage with it. The Euros, as one of the most widely-watched and marketed sporting events on Earth, has demonstrated a strong relationship between the two like never before.
