BETTER CHANGE
Other stakeholders W oith the UK safer gambling week now ver for another year after running from
the 17th October and the high profile photo opportunities for the BGC and many politicians is it worth asking a
question about who is responsible for responsible gambling? The simple answer, and the provider of safer gambling
tools and messaging, is of course the operators, but does this allow the many other stakeholders in the industry to pass the book somewhat? This article outlines how we at Better Change worked with a Premier League football club to redress this balance and while promoting safer gambling week as a worthwhile initiative, we also wanted to make an Impact on a community…this community was fans of Southampton Football Club. Our conversations started with Southampton early in 2022 about how we could work together to make an impact during the 2022 safer gambling week. The project we devised with them will run from October 2022 to the end of the season in May 2023 and during that time we will scope out plans for the following football season too, the idea was to give impact and sustainability. Southampton were an excellent club for us to approach and couldn’t have been a better fit for our first experience of working with a topflight team. The club has a sustainability strategy called ‘The Halo effect’ (A clever nod to The Saints nickname of the club!). The strategy is a forward-thinking initiative based on 4 pillars of Fans, Environment, Social and Corporate and is derived to give impact to the community where the football club plays such an important role. Rather than being a statement on their website it is something the club live by and generate actions from the words they carefully created, a refreshing change. Interestingly the work we did to promote safer gambling
and signpost fans to support could fit into 2 or 3 of the different pillars.
30 NOVEMBER 2022
could benefi t
Better Change’s David Richardson asks: It is very easy to bash the gambling industry, but should other stakeholders play a role in safer gambling too?
What we did The project Better Change are delivering is split into 4 sections 1. Match Day activation 2. Research 3. Saints in the community 4. Website and social The Matchday activation launched the partnership at the
Premier League Match between Southampton and West Ham on the 16th October 2022, a 1-1 draw for anyone wondering. This involved a 10-strong team of Better Change staff basing themselves around the ground at 3 stations from early morning on the matchday to chat to fans with 2 main aims. The first to increase awareness of safer gambling and directing fans to the new content on the Southampton club website which we have created (https://
www.southamptonfc.com/sustainability/social- responsibility/safe-betting). The second being to gather data for a research project in partnership with the Centre of Excellence for Responsible Gaming based out of the University of Gibraltar to look at fans attitude to gambling in football. The results will be released in due course, but the interactions also allowed us to hear fans accounts of their relationships with gambling which will also be in the final report. The final part of the current project will run in 2023 and
allow us to engage with smaller fan groups via the community programme ran by the clubs, this will involve education talks and raising awareness, particularly amongst vulnerable communities. Even though at the time of writing it is not even 2 weeks
since we were at the match, one of the biggest impacts so far has been through the free ‘chat with a therapist’ sessions we provide for fans of the club. They could simply book on via a QR code at a time to suit them to have an initial chat with one of our gambling therapists. 2 fans who we directly spoke to have already done this and have been signposted for further support, this window for fans is open
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