A new form of gambling

  How to explain the rapid rise of online sports betting? Experts referred to it as the ‘gamblification’ of sport: ‘the colonisation of sports and sporting culture by the gambling industry’.9

  A crucial part of gamblification was the increased amount of sport shown on live TV, much of it through the Murdoch-owned Fox Sports. As Tabcorp’s Craig Nugent explained: ‘All the research we’ve done tells us that customers like to be able to watch the event they are betting on. They feel involved … Go to any pub or club in Australia and people are debating about sports.’ Research backed up Nugent’s comment. As early as 2013, pollster Roy Morgan found that adults who said they supported an NRL club were 72 per cent more likely to have gambled in the previous three months than non-NRL supporters.10

  The gamblification of sport was a triumph for Big Gambling. It was a business model turbocharged for big profits, as Charles Livingstone explains: ‘Online gambling doesn’t require much in the way of terrestrial infrastructure; no mailing charges or parcels to forward, no shops to rent and clean. It can be rapidly reproduced and has virtually unlimited potential for expansion.’11

  But gamblification was not an inevitable outcome of the rise of pervasive online technology. It took government inaction: failures to limit the number of online gambling licences granted, to ban gambling sponsorships of sporting codes, to effectively ban promotions and inducements, and to ban gambling advertising. And it took the pursuit of a predatory business model by gambling companies, together with a symbiotic relationship with media companies, to fully develop the business model. In this brave new world, gambling and its promotion were as pervasive as the air we breathe.

  Australia has the unsavoury reputation of being a world leader in online gambling. An American journalist – writing in 2024, as liberalisation of online gambling was sweeping his country – noted that ‘Australia’s experience should be a cautionary tale’ because ‘Australia presents the nightmare scenario of what happens when the industry starts to hit its full potential’.12

  Taking the leap

  The massive rise in online gambling would not have occurred without the active involvement of the major sporting codes. This happened despite significant pushback from the public at large, from selected high-profile players, and from some clubs, coaches and independent commentators. But these voices were drowned out by commentators and retired players who were recruited as spokespersons for the powerful, pro-gambling, online corporate business model, backed by the major media companies. This is especially the case for the AFL and the NRL.

  Decades in the making, the embrace of gambling sponsorship by the two biggest football codes had its origins, predictably, in money. During the 1980s, both sports became professionalised at both the national and international levels. Players demanded higher payments, athlete management agencies emerged to handle their affairs, and big business saw the opportunities of sponsoring sporting codes. Sport became big business and media executives discovered they were sitting on a goldmine.

  AFL clubs embraced poker machines as a financial saviour. And it began at the top. Prominent administrator Ross Oakley predicted there would be benefits for football from the introduction of poker machines in clubs, with the revenue from gambling helping to keep ticket prices down.13 Many clubs spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on buildings to house the machines, and several clubs offered special ‘gaming’ memberships for supporters. Speaking in 1991 of the opportunities pokies offered clubs, Hawthorn’s then CEO, John Lauritz, commenting that his club expected to rake in more than $30 000 per day from the club’s machines, enthused: ‘To us it’s almost mindboggling.’14

  The AFL was now emulating the leagues clubs in New South Wales. The linking of the two big codes to poker machines cemented the connection between sport and gambling, which over the coming decades would transform the nature of both, creating a damaging dependence. Clubs were forced into talking up the positives of the pokies – chiefly the revenue they earned – and ignoring their damaging effects.

  Television broadcasting deals with the top Australian football and rugby league competitions were first struck in the 1980s, but entrepreneur Christopher Skase’s 1987 deal between Channel Seven, which he had recently bought, and the Victorian Football League (VFL) set a new bar: it was worth $30 million over five years. Football was no longer just a suburban game between tribal rivals but a cash cow, and business types were recruited to run the professional leagues. Henceforth it was Football Ltd.15

  The initial driver of this new business culture was ever larger broadcasting deals. For their part, the media companies were keen to go along for the ride. Sports broadcasts became their lifeblood, with matches regularly dominating the lists of their most watched programs. The next phase of the sporting business model was to secure more lucrative corporate sponsorship. And gambling corporations seized the opportunities.

  In 2005, the AFL was the first of the codes to sign a sponsorship deal with an online gambling company when it struck a deal worth $2 million per season with Tabcorp and Betfair. But the deal had an additional sweetener: the code received a percentage of each betting transaction the companies handled. The more that AFL fans bet on games, the more funds the AFL raked in. In 2023, The Age reported that the AFL made between $30 million and $40 million from bookmaker ‘product fees’.16 The NRL earned $50 million from its deals with gambling firms in 2022.

  From these beginnings, ever more lucrative deals were struck between the codes and gambling companies every five years. Their purpose was as transparent as it was disturbing. According to gambling researcher Samatha Thomas, sports sponsorship is a contemporary gambling industry marketing practice that seeks to ‘promote its products, gain publicity, attract new customers, shape social and cultural attitudes, and build corporate and product image and support’.17

  Even though some clubs have since ditched pokies in a move to protect their fans, overall pokies continue to tie football codes to gambling. The clubs industry in New South Wales had been the largest backer of rugby league ever since pokies were first unleashed into the community in the mid-1950s. So reliant was the code on pokies revenue that certain machines were named after superstar players.18 At some AFL clubs, 30 per cent of revenue was derived from the devices.19

  The leadership of each code also proved decisive in the embracing of gambling sponsorship. The CEOs were personally and professionally invested in the gambling industry. David Gallop who was the CEO of the NRL between 2002 and 2012, and then CEO of soccer’s Football Federation Australia after that, joined Tabcorp’s board on his retirement in 2019 in order to help the company ‘form tighter relationships with sporting codes and win their broadcasting rights’.20 His replacement at the NRL, Peter V’landys, has had lifelong interests in gambling.

  V’Landys has been a powerful and influential sports administrator for decades. His parents migrated from Greece when he was a toddler, and although they struggled to feed the family, it was as a child that his obsession with horse racing began. At the age of ten, he said, he used to buy the Trotting Guide and The Sportsman, and go to the TAB and find somebody to put his bets on. ‘I found this guy, and the bugger would take a bloody sling every time I’d win,’ he recalled. ‘I had an unbelievable strike rate. I was a very good form reader. For my whole youth, I used to punt quite a bit for a young bloke.’21

  V’Landys went on to head up racing in New South Wales from 2004, and joined the board of the Australian Rugby League Commission in 2018. He has been the dominant administrator in both sports, where he has made known his strong pro-gambling views, including support for gambling advertising during sports. He has also backed the use of inducements by gambling companies, describing them as ‘generosities’ similar to retail offers like ‘buy one get one free’. His vision for the future of horse racing brought these views fully into the open. During his appearance at the 2024 Asian Racing Federation Conference, he expressed his desire to use mobile phone apps ‘to attract younger audiences, particularly teenagers’. The challenge for racing, he said, ‘is to get where other sports are: attacking the 14 year olds’.22

  Was V’Landys actually saying that 14-year-old children should be provided gambling apps, or did he envisage these to be non-gambling apps, just ‘fun’ ways of stimulating interest in racing among young people? It wasn’t clear, but either way his comments were disturbing. More gambling on racing was required, he seemed to be saying, and young people should be the target market. After all, he’d started gambling as a ten-year-old.

  The same personal connection to gambling pervaded the most senior level of the AFL. Between 2003 and 2023 the code was headed first by Andrew Demetriou and, upon his retirement in 2014, by his deputy, Gillon McLachlan. Demetriou, known for his blunt, combative leadership style, was an enthusiastic punter and racegoer from an early age. His Cypriot immigrant father, Tony, introduced him and his brothers to gambling through his practice of placing bets at the TAB opposite the family fish and chip shop.

  Demetriou’s fascination with gambling continued after he completed his tertiary education studies and started teaching at Melbourne’s Trinity Grammar, where, in what he later described as an error of judgement, he engaged in betting with some students.23 On his retirement in 2013, Demetriou went onto the board at Packer’s Crown Resorts. (As we’ll see in Chapter 11, all members of the board claimed ignorance of the dark side of the company.)

  Demetriou’s successor at the AFL, McLachlan, was the product of a wealthy South Australian farming family and an elite private school. Tall with dark, foppish hair, he was a polo and horse racing enthusiast. His brother once describing the fun times he and Gillion had together ‘trying to get the quaddie [quadrella]’.24 Described as a ‘blue blood master deal maker’,25 he was the brains behind the AFL’s game-changing TV rights and corporate gambling deals of the 2000s and 2010s. McLachlan nailed his colours to the mast when, nine months after his departure as CEO of the AFL in 2023, he became CEO of Tabcorp on an annual salary of $1.5 million. He was heading a company that boasted revenue of $2.4 billion and 4000 gambling venues.

  The progression of both McLachlan and Demetriou into senior corporate gambling roles reflects the cosy relationship that built up between football and gambling companies over several decades.

  The gambling culture deeply embedded in both the AFL and the NRL, and in the mindset of their leaders, helps explain their unquestioning embrace of online gambling sponsors. There’s no evidence that searching questions were raised by the respective football CEOs about the dangers of associating their sport so closely with gambling entities. To these men, gambling is a legitimate form of entertainment and extending its reach to football was a natural development. But the risks associated with these deals were either underestimated or overlooked.

  As the money flowed into the sport, the salaries of the AFL’s twelve executives rose to nearly $1 million each by 2018. Demetriou’s salary rose from $560 000 in 2003 to nearly $4 million in 2014.26

  Not surprisingly, the new corporate culture of the AFL has attracted critics. Prominent among them is Michael Warner, whose 2021 book, The Boys’ Club, was a searing indictment of the sport’s senior administrators and the cloistered, self-aggrandising culture that has taken over the game. It’s a culture that is ‘besotted with brands and corporate speak’, and with a ‘love affair with corporate bookies’.27 Critics of this culture are regarded as enemies.

  Escalating returns

  The rights to broadcast football emerged almost out of nowhere to become rivers of gold for the big media companies. But the dangers were starkly highlighted in 2014, when the AFL broke new ground in a contract it struck with Matthew Tripp. He’d sold his stake in Sportsbet in 2009 for an estimated $200 million and formed BetEasy. With his new company, backed by a partnership with the Murdoch family, Tripp could see the potential for more lucrative sponsorship than what was being offered to the AFL by Tabcorp. In early 2014 he walked into McLachlan’s office to pitch his vision.

  By the time he walked out of the meeting, Tripp had made an astonishing offer. He would pay $6 million – 12 times the TAB’s price – for the exclusive right for his company to advertise on the AFL’s platforms, as well as first access to official broadcasters Channel Seven, Fox Sports and, as it was then, Telstra.

  Tripp knew exactly what impact his deal would have on the sport. Gambling is ‘the engine beneath the might of the AFL’, Tripp told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2022. ‘It’s a massive reliance now … If you rip gambling revenue out, they’re going to say: “Well, what the hell do we do now?”’28 Tripp was right, and the AFL doubled down on its relationship with the gambling industry.

  In 2015, McLachlan signed what was billed at the time as the biggest sporting deal in Australian history: a six-year, $2.5-billion broadcasting rights deal between the AFL and a consortium comprising Channel Seven, Telstra and Fox Sports. Globally, media executives were convinced that gambling was integral in keeping fans engaged – ‘fans who bet watch longer than the rest’, said one.29

  Thus, in the online sports betting era, the task for the business executives running football was to grow the value of their broadcasting rights by encouraging more young people to engage in gambling. And they succeeded. Today, the NRL and the AFL together attract about half of all sports betting in Australia.30

  In 2022, McLachlan negotiated a renewal of the AFL’s broadcasting rights with Foxtel and Channel Seven for a staggering $4.5 billion over seven years. At the time it was thought that, with television audiences in decline and the advent of streaming sports services, the value of such deals had already peaked. But there was an assumption built into the heart of the deal: gambling ads would help recoup the massive outlay. ‘To maximise revenues,’ corporate adviser Chris Blyth wrote of the escalating TV sports rights deals, ‘broadcasters sell a portion of advertising space to gambling companies.’31 And gambling companies, being among the nation’s biggest advertisers, were ever ready to help out.32

  Thus, the deals with online gambling companies made by both the NRL and the AFL tied the codes to the promotion of gambling. Taken together with cricket and tennis, Australia’s major broadcasters now pay out $1 billion per year for TV sporting rights – three times more than a decade previously.33 This outlay has to be recouped from somewhere, and gambling ads fill the breach. The unsuspecting public was therefore hit by a tsunami of gambling ads – at grounds, on websites and in the mainstream and social media.

  And when fans sit down on a Friday night, often with their children, to watch the footy, gambling is pushed on them with the relentlessness of a jackhammer. Former players take a leading role in spruiking the bets punters can make.

  Charles Livingstone estimates that punters are losing about $500 million a year on AFL matches.34 Until the use of credit cards for gambling was banned in 2023, banks that offered credit for gambling were exposed to charges of exploitation and hypocrisy. As one commentator noted, ‘Gambling is not considered a permitted purpose for obtaining a loan from a bank. So how is gambling a permitted purpose for a credit card?’35 Of course, it never should have been. Financial counsellors were well aware that regular cash advances from credit cards were ‘a red flag for gambling harm’.36 But Australia’s banks were – at least until the release of the report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry in 2017–19 – caught in a quagmire of scandals and unethical behaviour.

  But a moral quagmire now sits beneath the business model of the AFL and the NRL. Both codes promote community causes and see themselves as good corporate citizens. The AFL promotes awareness of Indigenous issues, medical research for chronic disease and ending violence against women. Yet it’s in bed with an industry that causes huge social damage, including family violence. The football leagues have cracked down hard on the small number of players found to have placed bets on their code’s football matches, while at the same normalising and encouraging lifelong gambling for them and countless other young men in society.

  ‘It’s no secret,’ writes sports journalist Matt Walsh, ‘that cashedup young AFL footballers don’t mind a punt – after all, combining disposable income with wide-ranging access to betting applications and sporting events on which to bet is a perfect storm for players to get an easy thrill.’37

  A disturbing number of professional footballers have succumbed to gambling addiction, but very few by betting on football games. In 2005 it was reported that nearly half of all NRL players polled in an annual survey acknowledged knowing a player with a gambling addiction. Gambling had replaced sex, alcohol and drugs as the code’s biggest off-field problem, according to confidential responses from 100 elite players in that year’s Rugby League Week player survey.38

  In 2019, it was the AFL’s turn for gambling to be exposed as a major problem when it was reported that two AFL stars had lost $1 million each through gambling, and that up to 120 players and coaches had gambling problems. The information came from counsellor Jan Beames, an expert in assisting elite sportspeople to fight their gambling addictions. Most, she said, were linked to horse racing.39

  Having helped introduce a pervasive gambling culture to Australian sport, the AFL and the NRL now provide players with gambling education programs. As Ben Smith, General Manager of Player Development at the AFL Players’ Association, explained in 2021, young players coming into the system are made ‘aware of how gambling industries operate and where they’re at risk or vulnerable’.40 The same players run onto grounds with gambling ads blazing all around them, while the executives plot the next deal to keep the community saturated in ads that promote gambling as a normal way to enjoy sport.

  The latest player gambling scandal occurred in June 2025, when Victoria Police charged two soccer players, including one A-League player, for breaching betting rules by allegedly manipulating yellow cards in Australia’s top-tier soccer competition. As The Sydney Morning Herald explained: