Could the FA tightening rules about owners and gambling affect the Albion?

The FA could be set to reassess its rules regarding football club owners and gambling after suffering a chastening legal defeat.

The governing body had charged Plucky Little Bournemouth’s multimillionaire oligarch owner Maxim Demin with betting on football, something that is outlawed for those involved in running a club in much the same way it is for players.

Demin’s lawyers however managed to get the charges dropped based on the fact that the man who funded their “fairytale” rise from League Two to the Premier Division is not actually named as chairman or a director of the Cherries.

That means he isn’t “a participant” in football according to the FA’s own rules and therefore does not come under their jurisdiction, leaving him free reign to gamble on football, including matches in which his own team are involved.

There are a number of other Premier League clubs who have owners not named on their boards including West Bromwich Albion and Southampton, not to mention those further down the pyramid. The legal ruling opens up the possibility that they too could bet on the sport.

As a result, the FA are reviewing their current regulations, which could lead to a tightening up of the rules surrounding club owners and gambling.

At the moment, Tony Bloom and other owners involved in the gambling industry such as his hated rival Matthew Benham at Brentford are actually subject to a separate set of secret rules which the FA has refused to publish.

Hardly anybody knows what these rules consist of. The New York Times attempted to run an article on these rules shortly after our promotion to the Premier League (American’s have a curiosity about the potential conflict of interest that comes with someone involved with a sport betting on it after the 1919 Black Sox Scandal in which eight Chicago Black Sox players were accused of internationally losing baseball’s World Series).

The only glean of information they managed to procure was that Bloom’s company, Starlizard, had their accounts audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers who submitted them to the FA to “confirm their appliance with the applicable FA regulations”.

UEFA doesn’t consider the fact that Starlizard, a betting consultancy firm, stake millions of pounds on the outcome of football games as a potential conflict of interest.

The European governing body are on record as saying that they have an ongoing relationship with Starlizard. A spokesperson for Starlizard itself said “our knowledge of how the betting markets should play out before and during the match are incredibly valuable to the anti-match-fixing work carried out by numerous football authorities.”

The Demin case is likely to lead to widespread calls for change in the rules regarding owners and betting. Players as far down the pyramid as the Isthmian South League are banned from betting on any football anywhere in the world.

The law is so stringent that if you work 9-5 Monday to Friday as a plumber but happen to play football on a Saturday for Shoreham, you can’t even put £1 on Germany to win this summer’s World Cup.

Joey Barton is the most high profile example of a player being done for breaching the betting regulations, receiving an 18 month ban and a £30,000 fine in April 2017. Prick though he may be, Barton was quite right when he pointed out the hypocrisy of the FA having a zero tolerance approach to players gambling on football, yet at the same happily taking £4m a year through a partnership with Ladbrokes.

That partnership was very quickly cancelled after Barton’s comments as the FA sought to maintain its laughable squeaky clean image – an image which again comes into question following these developments.

That means that a tightening of the general rules is inevitable to stop the likes of Demin gambling on a sport that they are actively involved in and can in theory influence.

But what about the secret rules that govern the likes of ourselves and Brentford? Any significant changes to those as a result of the Demin case could have severe repercussions on the financial health and status of the Albion given that Bloom personally financed both the Amex and our rise to the Premier League.

Watch this space.