Gambling Sponsors Offer Soccer a Faustian Bargain: Cash Comes With Corruption

(MoneyWatch)  The choke-hold that online gambling sponsors have over soccer was writ large this week when Olympique Lyonnais complained that its sponsor, BetClic, was unfairly treated in a Champions League match. Betting web sites have brought much-needed cash to football, but the money has come with a seamy side: match-fixing scandals. Here's how the two are linked.

On Wednesday, when Lyon played Real Madrid at the latter's Death Star-sized stadium in Spain (video below), the French football club walked out onto the field with "blank" shirts bereft of sponsors. The unusual sight -- triggered by a French law that bans clubs from taking gambling sponsors in European away games -- led to complaints from Lyon, which is sponsored by BetClic. Madrid, under Spanish jurisdiction, displayed the logo of Bwin, a competitor to Betclic.

The disparity led Lyon and BetClic to make a joint statement before the match, criticizing UEFA, the body that governs European football:

Olympique Lyonnais is now faced with the fact that we cannot display our sponsors logo this Wednesday in Madrid, in a country which legally allows this type of publicity, and during a match where the main competitor of BetClic will appear on the shirts of Real Madrid!

The dispute highlights gambling's increasing grip on the world of football: Rare is the team that does not have a gambling sponsor. Dozens of teams take to the pitch with 888Bet or Bwin on their chests, and if the logos aren't on the shirt they adorn the hoardings around the stadium.

Football clubs are addicted to gambling sponsorship money. They need it to stave off their debtors and to pay the massive bills required to buy star players who can win games. And gambling sponsors appear to offer football a virtuous economic cycle: We'll give you the sponsorship money you need to stay afloat. Our advertising will attract more bettors. This in turn will allow us to pay you higher sponsor fees in the future, and so on and so forth.

But there's a downside to the increasing popularity of sports betting: With it comes corruption on a massive scale. UEFA is currently investigating 200 games in a match-fixing probe linked to bettors. Three of those games were in the Champions League, the prestigious international tournament that only top-ranked teams may enter.

Greece is probing a separate set of match-fixing allegations. And a Bosnian referee was recently banned for life after he was found rigging games.

There is no direct link between gambling companies and corruption of course. But their presence sets the stage for it: Sponsors want more people to bet, and that increases the number of people with a vested interest in the outcome of every game. In turn, that extends the population of people who might be tempted to interfere with a match.

And interfere they do: Last year the captain of Accrington Stanley, a lower-league British team, was banned for eight months after betting his own team would lose. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but it was only weeks ago that Accrington faced top-flight Fulham F.C. in an F.A. Cup game -- so even minor league players have the potential to rig championship results.

Like any Faustian bargain, there's no way out of it: Teams or countries that don't take gambling cash will have fewer financial resources with which to compete, and their fortunes will decline. So it appears we're stuck with them.

The question is, as U.S. sports such as the NFL increasingly eye shirt sponsorships (and 11 soccer teams here already have them) will they resist the temptations that have bedeviled their European counterparts?

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