Yet it is a bizarre strategy to take money from an industry that is closely tied to social change, which has seen such a drastic drop in participation. Rugby league is robbing Peter to pay Paul, only Peter and Paul are busy losing all their money in the pub and on their betting accounts and will not register with their teams to play this year. By creating more young male gamblers, rugby league is helping to accelerate the decline in its own player numbers.
The V’landys, who run Racing NSW when they are not at work running rugby league, are not the only supporters of gambling. He is an evangelical. Gambling, in his view, is not a necessary evil that comes with the game but a welcome and enjoyable part of it.
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Millions of people share that idea and enjoy gambling responsibly (which means not losing enough of your money, in the long run, to get into serious trouble).
V’landys sees gambling as the financial basis that makes the big game sustainable, and so new gamblers must be recruited.
At racing festivals, like Father Christmas, he hands out betting vouchers to young adults who come across as new to the sport. If it works — that is, if they enjoy the young adult experience so much they hold back and start losing their money — it meets management’s financial goals.
This neat roundabout has created the racing industry. Your betting habit, as long as you are a pure loser, pays for the spectacle. But the league is not a race, and until it recognizes the difference, it will continue to generate dollars to pour into holes of its own making.
Peter V’Landis’ gambling embrace is affecting participation rates.Credit:Anna Var, Dominic Lorimer
This week, ARLC announced a proposed expansion of its gambling activities in the United States. Online betting apps were only legalized in New York in January 2022, and they already have one million users. More than 100 million people gambled in last month’s Super Bowl.
“I think it has the potential to be one of the really big new revenue generators for the game,” V’landys was reported as saying. “I think they’ll love the game if done right, and we can do that in conjunction with taking a game to the United States. We want to fix that and do it intelligently with our vision.” Basketball is the No. 1 sports-betting product in Australia because there are a lot of overseas bets. We’re hoping we can start sometime this year, and we have a number of partners we’re talking to.
Growth in gambling revenue helped ARLC create a $43 million surplus last year. In other words, the spending of the league watching population shifted from buying shoes and mouthguards and registering for clubs to losing bets. League’s reaction? Find new populations to tax.
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COVID-19 proved to be a boon for gambling. At stake is Australian spending Three times According to an analytical study by Accenture and Illion, from 2020. An Australian government survey found that there was a large increase in men aged 18 to 34, whose personal spending increased by more than 50 percent and who were at the highest risk of gambling-related harm.
So the same demographic that rugby league is losing from its sports ranks is successfully turning to sports bookmakers.
In racing, which recirculates money between the gambler and the participants, this hardly matters. The newly converted gambler was never going to be a jockey. But in rugby league, those youngsters are making active choices every weekend. Pub or Play? Do I spend my money on registration fees and gear and fitness and getting out? Oh no, I don’t have any spare cash now, it just disappeared somewhere.
It doesn’t have to be that way – there’s nothing stopping anyone from playing amateur rugby league and betting on it – but if you’ve got something to do with young men, you might want to consider the actual reality. Their gambling losses are revolving around the game they are choosing to stop playing, in record numbers.
The South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Canterbury Bulldogs deserve to be congratulated for refusing to accept gambling money now in the form of Jersey sponsorship.
He has seen a truth that the game’s governors are still blind to: the prominence of gambling, the style of rugby league as a vehicle for more and more young people to gamble, the concept of rugby league as if it were racing, many There is an active turn to parents and an unsavory attachment to a sport that should have at least something to do with health and fitness. Those two clubs, Rabbitoh and Bulldogs, are looking at their fans as people, not just as a source of potential income.
Rabbitohs, like Bulldogs, avoid gambling sponsorship money on their jerseys.Credit:Getty Images
There are numbers and there are numbers. One dollar betting income is just a number. A person who has dropped out of the game is “a number” in the census, sure, but he is also a young person who has made a decision. Higher-ups, in their obsession with one type of number, have overlooked how much damage they are doing to their own cause.
