Gambling consumed Tony Kelly both on and off the pitch to the point where he went bankrupt. He now faces a new financial challenge: funding his charity, which works to raise awareness of gambling risks, particularly among footballers like he once was.
Over the course of his career, Kelly made 179 professional appearances. If it wasn’t for his gambling compulsion, it could have been over 400, he told me in an interview this week.
Past managers included Alan Ball and Lou Macari, who struggled to understand his sporadic form.
“If you sat down with Lou Macari now, he’d say to you, ‘Yeah, Tony, great ability, I gave him a two-year contract, but one week he’d be out of this world, the next week I didn’t recognize him.'”
What they didn’t know was that his gambling problem was taking over his life.
“I struggled with my form because of the anxiety and the stress,” Kelly says. “Can I pay the mortgage on a Monday? Isolation, not going out with teammates, canceling visits to my missus, canceling nights out… that’s why my form was so sporadic.”
He lost more than £500,000 to gambling, far more than his salary when playing in the second, third, and fourth divisions of English football for clubs such as Leyton Orient, Bury, Colchester United, Cardiff City, and Hull City
“Obviously, I was staying in denial, so I never told any managers,” he adds. Now, he is trying to help prevent other young footballers from going down the same path he did.
Redemption Story Can Save Others
Instead of a football jersey, Kelly now dons a black polo shirt with the logo of Red Card Gambling, the charity he founded after recovering from his own gambling problems.
His latest book, My Redemption: It’s Full Time, tells the story of his journey through gambling addiction, professional football, and his recovery. His work with Red Card Gambling mainly focuses on educational programs and sharing his lived experience, primarily with young footballers.
“The work is all about raising awareness and educating people, particularly young people, that if you have your first bet, if you download an app or you go onto a website, you have no idea where that first bet will take you. This is what could happen. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it will happen, but it could happen,” he says.
Gambling Remains Rife In Football
When Kelly was playing in the 1990s, gambling was often in card games on team buses.
“It was normal for six or seven players of every football club I’ve been at to have a card school—back of the coach, 4-hour journeys on away trips, playing three-card brag, a lot of money spent. And the normalization of it is the fact that directors and managers will come down and play with you,” Kelly recalls.
While that might not happen on team buses nowadays, gambling remains just as prevalent, says Kelly.
When his first book, Red Card, was published, he worked as a liaison officer at Premier League side Tottenham. He remembers being taken aside by Les Ferdinand and Tim Sherwood, who were coaches at the club, and being told, “Tony, gambling’s rife at this club.”
Nowadays, there are fewer card games on coaches, but every player can access online casinos at the touch of a button. As a result, it becomes easier to hide.
Kelly believes the punishment of high-profile players for betting on football, such as current Tottenham midfielder Sandro Tonali, makes players more reluctant to come forward and admit to having a problem.
“They’ll feel they’re going to get banned,” says Kelly. “And I think there’s a real shame element to it. I think that’s across the board. From my experience, that’s the biggest factor about going through a problem with gambling on a severe level—the shame factor.”
Lots of Research, Little Action
One of Kelly’s key messages is to make people aware that the shame preventing them from telling others is preventing them from recovering and living their best life. For a footballer, that could be a key difference in the success of their career.
“There will be footballers out there today, as we speak, who are going through a problem with gambling, but don’t want to talk about it and don’t want to feel shame about it,” he says.
To reach more players and young people suffering, Red Card Gambling needs more funding. Last year, the UK government introduced the gambling statutory levy, a mandatory tax imposed on licensed operators to fund the research, prevention, and treatment of gambling-related harms. It replaces a voluntary system and aims to generate around £100 million per year.
For Kelly, it remains a drop in the ocean, and he also believes that too much of the funds go towards research rather than proactive educational programs.
“From our perspective, there’s only so much research you can do; it’s the same old research, millions and millions of pounds year on year on year. While that’s going on, hundreds of thousands of people are still suffering gambling harm, so we have to really make an effort to make sure that there’s enough funding out there for all organizations like Red Card to deliver educational awareness projects,” he says.
Challenge of Convincing Operators To Offer Funding
There is debate over whether organizations should accept money directly from operators. The National Council on Problem Gambling is under pressure for accepting $2 million from Kalshi. With members leaving in protest, some say the group should rethink its funding model.
“For smaller organizations like Red Card we have to survive, and the only way to survive is by getting funding,” says Kelly. “It doesn’t matter whether it comes from government funding or from an operator.”
He shares his story on various platforms, and using his backstory, he says that he is willing to work with anyone within the industry to raise awareness of gambling harms for all.
In 2023, Kelly ran a project backed by Betway, delivering around 80 workshops at non-league football clubs in England.
“The project was so successful,” says Kelly. “We’ve got all the evidence, the evaluation report. Without that funding from Betway, we would not have been able to deliver that project. So that’s an example of an operator contributing to a powerful project that has been successful and has made a difference.”
The trouble is getting more operators on board to see the value of funding more future projects. Kelly hoped his connection with Stoke and the Coates family, who own bet365, would open doors, but the company has been unresponsive.
“Peter Coates was the chairman at Stoke in 1990. He was the one that literally signed me. So I have this relationship with the Coates family. Fast forward to now and his children, Denise and John, have taken over bet365. We’ve reached out to them by email, I’ve sent letters to the addresses in Stoke, their premises, and we have had no comeback whatsoever.”
The problem is showing an operator that a project which successfully reduces gambling is in their interests.
“There’s that conflict of interest. They’re probably thinking, ‘Oh, they’re educating people, they’re raising awareness, that will hurt our profits,'” Kelly explains. “That’s sad, because it should be that all operators have this balance of supporting charities and making sure that they adhere to their social responsibility policies. That’s what they should all be doing, all of them.”
Clubs Desperate for Intervention
On the football side, Kelly says he has a waiting list of clubs that want him to deliver his education program.
“We just get bombarded with football clubs saying, ‘Oh, can you come and talk to our academy players?’ They’re generally 16 to 19-year-olds,” he says.
“They’re all in their tracksuits before the game, talking about football results, who’s let me down. Betting is massive within the non-league football circuit and grassroots football.”
Showing The Dark Side of Gambling
With gambling normalized in football and society, Kelly believes it is essential to show how harmful it can be. A recent House of Lords report called for a complete ban on gambling advertising. Kelly does not go that far, but wants a change in how ads portray gambling.
“Generally, it’s all portrayed that gambling’s fun, that everyone’s happy, everybody wins. That’s what’s portrayed to us. What I would like to see is a change in terms of the imagery, in terms of the content, in terms of the language and the safer gambling messaging, because those slogans that we see like ‘Time to think’ or GambleAware down in the little bottom corner, they don’t have any impact, they have no substance,” Kelly says.
Research in the UK has shown that self-appraisal messages, such as asking, “Would you be comfortable telling your family how much you lost gambling today?” resonate more than generic slogans. Kelly wants to see stronger images, like the change in how tobacco is portrayed.
“There’s nothing that’s really impactful and powerful that opens people’s eyes to what gambling addiction might look like. Just like it was back in the day with smoking, showing parents standing at their son’s graveside with language that’s expressing the dangers of problem gambling, ‘This is what could happen’, that would make you think twice.”
“It needs people with lived experience, whether it’s me or whether it’s someone else. It could be a woman, it could be an affected other, but someone that’s on the screen saying, ‘This is what happened,’ and getting that message across to as many people as possible,” Kelly adds.
Battling the Myth That Football Needs Gambling Money
While not advocating for a blanket ban on advertising, Kelly does think football clubs should not promote gambling.
From this season, Premier League clubs no longer show gambling companies on the front of their shirts. Instead, logos have moved to shirt sleeves and continue to be shown around the pitch.
“When I heard the changes, I thought, this doesn’t make sense, removing it from the front of shirts and then still allowing them to advertise on the shirt sleeve and around the stadium,” says Kelly.
There have been many reports about the financial impact of losing gambling sponsors, but Kelly believes it is a myth that clubs cannot survive without the industry’s money.
“Every football club will survive without gambling sponsorship, it’s not the biggest revenue of the big players—the Man Uniteds, etc. Another sponsor will come along with various deals from a different sector, it’s not going to make a difference. Clubs are not going to fold,” Kelly says adamantly.
What about clubs further down the football pyramid?
“I’m going to stop you right there about clubs lower down. I’ve spoken with Tranmere chairman Mark Palios, they were one of the first to get rid of gambling sponsorship, and they are League Two. They’re fine, not going anywhere,” Kelly says.
“Then you have my hometown club, Coventry, who got rid of their gambling sponsor, Boylesports, about 18 months ago. They’re fine, not going anywhere.”
Coventry owner Doug King said he wanted to realign the club’s values with the local community, stating that featuring gambling logos on match kits sent the wrong message to younger fans and supporters struggling with addiction. Fans praised the move and the club won promotion to the Premier League last season.
Kelly wants more to follow the example, which he says proves clubs do not need to rely on gambling sponsorship money. Clubs can use their status to help raise awareness of gambling harm, rather than promote the activity.
“We are the first charity to sponsor a non-league football club on the opposite side in terms of promoting gambling awareness education with North West London FC,” Kelly says.
Eventually, he believes gambling sponsors will disappear from football, but it may take some years. In the meantime, he will keep trying to raise awareness of gambling harm in the hope that players avoid making the same mistakes he did. That is his redemption.
For more information on the work Tony does at Red Card, visit www.redcardgambling.org or contact Tony Kelly directly at tony@redcardgambling.org.
The post Ex-Stoke Player Tony Kelly’s Journey From Gambling Addict To Redemption appeared first on Gambling Insider.