Problem gambling among athletes in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Gambling among athletes has increasingly attracted the interest of policymakers and key stakeholders over recent years. This has been fuelled by high-profile cases of elite sports people disclosing extreme gambling behaviour. For example, John Daly, a leading American golfer, claims to have lost over $50m in his autobiography (Daly & Waggoner, 2006). More recently, allegations regarding the fixing of horse races by owners and jockeys (Lees, 2009) and of the bowling of deliberate no-balls (spot-fixing bets) by Pakistani cricketers in a match against England (Mahmood & Evans, 2010) have served to highlight the issue of corruption related to sports gambling. Despite this, only a limited body of empirical work has explored the extent of problem gambling among athletes (e.g. Ellenbogen et al., 2008; Engwall et al., 2004), and there is no empirical research in UK athletes.