Everton’s change of heart regarding betting companies

Everton have long been renowned as a homely, traditional club – and not just because they aren’t Liverpool. Whether it’s rickety, atmospheric Goodison Park with its playing of Z-Cars before every game, a mid-80s run of banging kits, or the cutesy way Everton fans describe themselves, not as “Everton fans” but as “Evertonians”, there’s something special and unique about the residents of Stanley Park North. The Fiver is choking up!

But wherever there’s feeling there’s a suit converting it into coin, and sure enough, Everton have just signed a sponsorship deal with a gambling company. Or, as the Toffees’ Professor Denise Barrett-Baxendale put it, “an ambitious organisation with impressive growth plans”. For reasons known best to herself, she left “to take even more money from even more people” in unspoken parentheses, but the next time she or one of her lackeys rolls out the “People’s Club” moniker, that’ll be what they mean.

Nor did the Prof – honorary, visiting, six years ago – finish there. Rather, she fawningly thanked the aforementioned gambling company for their benevolence in “choosing Everton as a long-term partner”, before presumably hopping on one leg and barking like a dog. Who says romance is dead?

The strange thing is, back in 2020 Everton were involved with a different gambling company – one involved in the devastating epidemic of gambling addiction among young people in Kenya. Following but not because of protests from fans, the club brought the deal to an early conclusion, and the Prof – who, before her promotion, ran Everton’s community programme! – acknowledged that deals with betting companies were suboptimal. Yet, here we are again – because, we’re informed, the commercial reality of competing in the