The FA’s Betting Ban Falls Hardest on Non-League: What the Charge Sheet Shows

The FA brought 274 betting charges against people in football between the start of 2015 and the end of last year.

More than 200 of those charges were brought against non-league players, managers and club officials.

The entire professional game, from the Premier League down to League Two, accounted for 68 of them.

That is roughly three non-league cases for every one above it, and the people carrying them are part-time.

Charge sheet

Those cases cover 148,968 separate bets, out of close to 200,000 identified across the whole of the decade.

The fines tell a rather different story, and it is the part of the charge sheet that nobody has looked at properly.

Non-league accounts for £152,418 of the £491,000 handed out, which is 31 per cent of the money against 73 per cent of the charges.

That works out at roughly £762 a case, against something nearer £4,575 everywhere else in the game.

Some players and staff are dealt with by a warning alone, or by fines of as little as £75 to £100.

This is not the FA coming down hard on the pyramid, but its entire betting caseload being made up of non-league, at penalties far too small to deter anybody.

The analysis is Steve Menary’s, built from the monthly charge lists that the FA publishes on its own website.

£97.50 a week

James Byrne placed 992 bets on football between the start of 2015 and the end of 2024, while playing at Step 4.

He won close to £50,000 doing it, which is the detail that turned an ordinary charge into a record one.

The Portishead Town midfielder was fined £48,388.66, the largest betting penalty in non-league history, and given no suspension at all.

He earns £97.50 a week from football, which the FA put at roughly 500 times his weekly pay, and a payment plan was offered.

“JB consciously decided to continue betting on football whilst playing in Step 4 football, fully in the knowledge that it was in breach of rules.”

Byrne told the FA he works as a sports data consultant, and that bookmakers would often close his accounts because he kept winning.

The fine was not plucked from the air. It matched his profit, because the FA calculates betting penalties on winnings rather than on stakes or on a player’s ability to pay.

The comparison worth drawing is with Lewis Macari, who placed 354 bets at an average stake of £8.52 while contracted in the EFL.

He was fined £750 and given a three-month suspension, suspended for twelve months, which means that he served none of it.

He was also represented at the hearing by Nick Cusack, an advocate supplied by the Professional Footballers’ Association.

No representation

That last detail is the one that matters most, and it is not available to the majority of people on the charge sheet.

The PFA covers players at Premier League, Women’s Super League and EFL clubs on full contracts, and membership includes representation at FA disciplinary hearings.

On everybody below that level, the union’s own published position is unusually blunt and worth quoting in full.

“The PFA does not have an agreement in place with the FA or the League to represent National League players as their recognised trade union.”

By the union’s own estimate, almost 80 per cent of National League players are former PFA members, having been professionals or scholars higher up.

They had representation once, dropped a division or two, and lost it along with the contract that came with it.

So the three-quarters of charges that land on non-league are also the three-quarters least likely to have anybody in the room.

Macari had Cusack, and Byrne, on £97.50 a week from football, faced the commission on his own.

Caught by data

Nobody down here is caught by an informant in the clubhouse or by a tip-off from somebody at the bar.

Players are caught by data, because operators licensed in Britain report suspicious activity to the Gambling Commission and work directly with the FA.

A licensed betting account is verified against a named person, and that record does not go away afterwards.

Which is why, as Menary points out, some players simply migrate to unlicensed offshore books where no report is ever filed.

The thing worth saying to anybody tempted by that is that a paper trail cuts in both directions. Going offshore to avoid a record also means giving up verification, documented payouts and anywhere at all to complain when a withdrawal stalls.

CashAudit sets out how those identity checks and payout timings actually work on the licensed side of the market.

The sleeve

The Isthmian, Northern Premier and Southern Leagues are sponsored by Pitching In, which is the community programme of Entain, the owner of Ladbrokes and Coral.

Clubs in those three leagues are contractually required to carry gambling branding on their shirt sleeves.

Those are the exact Steps at which a player may not place a bet on any football match anywhere in the world.

Lewes FC illustrates the position better than any argument could, and they have gone out of their way to do it.

The fan-owned Isthmian Premier club refuses betting sponsorship, campaigns against gambling advertising, and this season carries a self-exclusion software company on the front of its shirt.

It still wears the Pitching In sleeve, because the league sponsorship gives the club no choice in the matter.

“We are delighted to partner with Lewes FC, which has been leading by example in refusing betting sponsorship and calling for an end to gambling ads in football,” said Gamban co-founder Matt Zarb-Cousin.

Lewes director John Peel described the new front-of-shirt rules arriving higher up the pyramid as “tokenistic”.

The bill

A Step 4 player cannot put £2 on a Bundesliga match without breaching a rule that could cost him years of football earnings.

He plays in a league named after a bookmaker’s community programme, in a shirt with a gambling logo on the sleeve.

Whatever the FA has built at this level of the game, it is not an integrity regime.

It is a paperwork exercise that runs at £762 a case, aimed at the only people in football who cannot afford a lawyer.

18+ only. Gambling can be addictive. Please play responsibly. In the UK, the National Gambling Helpline is free and confidential on 0808 8020 133.