7 minute read
Editorial
Editor
Tom Wheare
Managing Editor
Jonathan Barnes
Production Editor
Scott James
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Gerry Cookson Email: gcookson@johncatt.com Conference & Common Room is published three times a year, in January, May and September. ISSN 0265 4458 Subscriptions: £25 for a two-year subscription, post paid; discounts for bulk orders available. Advertising and Subscription enquiries to the publishers: John Catt Educational Ltd, 15 Riduna Park, Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 1QT. Tel: (01394) 389850. Fax: (01394) 386893. Email: enquiries@johncatt.com
Managing Director
Alex Sharratt
Editorial Director
Jonathan Barnes Editorial address: Tom Wheare, 63 Chapel Lane, Zeals, Warminster, Wilts BA12 6NP Email: tom.wheare@gmail.com Opinions expressed in Conference & Common Room are not necessarily those of the publishers; likewise advertisements and editorial are printed in good faith, and their inclusion does not imply endorsement by the publishers. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recorded or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Editor and/or the publishers. Printed in England by Micropress Printers, Suffolk, IP18 6DH
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Autumn 2018
The FIFA World Cup held this summer in Russia was a great success. Matches were competitive and entertaining, former winners and pre-tournament favourites such as Spain and Germany were knocked out in the group stages – and England wasn’t. Underdogs had their day when South Korea matched the North Korean victory over Italy in 1966 by beating Germany. Analysis undertaken by the Cambridge University Press Language Research team (p55) identified the words most popularly associated with all the World Cup teams. Spain ‘failed’, Germany were ‘stunned’ and South Korea were ‘plucky’. Belgium, former holders of that epithet, albeit in a different context, were ‘star-studded’ but didn’t win, and France, who did, were ‘lucky’.
The other big winners were the hosts Russia, for whom the tournament was undoubtedly a triumph, and the television companies who netted 815 million viewers. These will have seen the name of Chinese property company Wanda prominently displayed on the bill boards around the grounds, demonstrating that the vast Chinese market has now focused on the world game.
Television money has transformed football, especially in England, and the sums now involved are mind-blowing. Key to all of this is advertising revenue, a significant amount of which comes from betting companies.
Thanks to smartphones, the urge to gamble can be gratified instantaneously and the betting companies are making sure that their business is prominently on show, as an article in The Guardian of 16th July demonstrated. Their analysis of more than 1,300 adverts shown during the first thirty World Cup games on ITV revealed that one in eight were for betting. Of the eight and a half hours of advertising shown during ITV’s coverage of England’s progress through the World Cup, the 172 betting advertising slots amounted to nearly ninety minutes or a whole football match, one and a half times as much as the advertising for alcohol firms and four times the amount for fast food outlets.
In the UK gambling adverts can only be shown before the 9.00 pm watershed as part of the coverage of a live sporting event. In Australia, a country which is often described as sport mad, the opposite is true, and gambling adverts in the course of live sporting coverage are completely banned.
Nine out of twenty premier league clubs and seventeen out of twenty four Championship clubs now have the names or logos of gambling companies prominently displayed on their shirts, whilst popular sports broadcasters feature in betting advertisements, including those which display the fig-leaf ‘when the fun stops, stop’.
Football has been closely associated with gambling since the introduction of football pools by John Moores in 1923. Ten million people played the pools in 1994 but by 2007 the number had fallen to 700,000 as other forms of gambling and, in particular, the government sponsored National Lottery, became more popular. The pools were exempt from gambling tax because, it was claimed, they were games of skill not games of chance, a notion to which many gamblers subscribed. Whilst studying form is a feature of sports gambling, from horse racing to football, the fact remains that ‘the house’ always comes out on top in the long run. The Lottery, however, is exactly what it says, a matter of chance.
It is not so long ago that tobacco advertising dominated sporting events and it was, presumably, not far from the minds of the tobacco companies that sport was a good way of getting into the minds of the young. Nobody in education will be unaware of the attraction smoking has for teenagers, nor of the fact that nearly all habitual adult smokers began when they were under eighteen. Nevertheless, the sustained campaign against smoking in public places that closely followed the ban on tobacco advertising in sport, has had a noticeable effect, and the prevalence of smoking among children has reduced steadily since the 1990s.
The gambling industry has to some extent replaced the tobacco companies in using sport as a means to promote their product, a product that shares some of the same addictive potential. Like the Portman Group, funded by companies involved in drinks production to promote best practice in the area of alcoholic drinks, GambleAware (p23) depends upon voluntary donations from what might be called the ‘parent’ industry in its
mission to limit the harm gambling can cause. The number of children classed as ‘problem gamblers’ is startling, but perhaps more concerning is the prevalence of occasional gambling amongst pupils, rather like those who, at first, smoke the occasional cigarette. Football clubs change their kit each year to make a profit from the lucrative replica kit market, and having the names of the betting companies on those shirts not only means that they are literally woven into something that embodies a powerful loyalty, but also makes them seem domestic, almost part of the family. As with so many of the problems facing society, education is the key and, yet again, if progress is to be made, it will be the responsibility of schools and teachers.
Fortunately, school communities rise to challenges, as you may read within. Six GSA Heads, including the President and President elect, look to the future with inspiring enthusiasm (p15), and their pupils revel in the academic and sporting opportunities on offer. This is not fake news but genuine ground for hope and even confidence in their ability to manage our future. Much is written about the impact Artificial Intelligence will have on the work place and on society in general. Although the future may be hard to predict, situated as it is in the cloud, schools seek to provide their pupils with open routes to further and higher education and the best possible preparation for fulfilling jobs. But beyond this, and much more importantly, schools are dedicated to developing social awareness and the ability to manage risk, and they celebrate flexibility and optimism, so that this generation may, like the England football team, be ‘confident’ and ‘fresh’.
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