When I was about eleven or twelve, while travelling home from school one Friday evening, I came across the ‘shell game’ for the first time.

The shell game is an old conjuring trick where a pea is hidden under one of three identical shells, and they are then shuffled by the operator in plain view of the audience who have to guess which shell the pea is under. It can also be played with balls and cups.

On that Friday evening in central Cape Town, rather than shells, it was bottle tops. And it was not a magician entertaining. It was a gang of conmen. The ringleader ‘allowed’ his accomplices to win a few rounds more than they lost, ‘winning’ for themselves a reasonable return.

What followed has haunted me for over 50 years. A labourer from the nearby docks, having just received his weekly wage, was on his way back to his hostel. He would have been a migrant worker, forced by the apartheid regime to leave his family hundreds of miles away, to work for 50 weeks at a time, often on the gold mines of the Transvaal or, in this instance, the docks in Cape Town.

Within five minutes he had been cleaned out by the gang. He didn’t stand a chance as he was conned out of his meagre wages. Once his last Rand was gone, he pleaded, in tears, with the ringleader to return some of the money as he had nothing to send home to his family. The conman just laughed in his face and disappeared into the curious crowd that had gathered, leaving the victim, a grown man in his thirties, sobbing on the pavement, totally humiliated, broken and broke.

Since that day the idea of losing one’s money through gambling has made me feel sick in the pit of my stomach. I suppose I react like that because I am attracted by, and could have been susceptible to, the false seduction of a quick win. I do buy a lottery ticket most weeks and, like many others, I fantasised about what I would have done had I won the recent £186 million on the EuroMillions.

Gambling is a major cancer in our society, destroying lives, breaking families and impoverishing communities.

A recent YouGov survey said that 1.4 million people in Britain are being harmed by gambling with a further 1.5 million at risk. Gambling advertising is in your face just about everywhere, not least in sport.

Half of all Premier League football teams have gambling companies advertised on their shirts. Meanwhile, the English Football League, the Championship and Divisions 1 and 2, are sponsored by Sky Bet, benefiting the clubs by £40m a year. Just about all sport on television is accompanied by saturation advertisements for gambling companies.

The two football teams I support have contrasting relationships with the gambling industry. Stoke City, who I have supported all my life and who currently play in the Championship, is not only sponsored by a gambling company, but the company owns a majority stake in the club. The chairman of Stoke City is a director of that company while his daughter is its founder, majority shareholder and joint chief executive. In October 2019, Forbes magazine estimated her net worth at $12.2 billion. In 2020, she received a salary of £422 million with dividends of a further £48 million.

There certainly are a few winners from gambling.

Lewes Football Club, on the other hand, has led calls to “kick gambling advertising out of football.” It points out that 450,000 11 to 16-year-olds gamble and that at least 55,000 are already addicted. It has refused gambling sponsorship money and, in 2019, was the first football club to sign up to ‘Gambling with Lives’, a pioneering gambling education programme. ‘Gambling with Lives’ was set up by families bereaved by gambling-related suicide and points out that “every day someone takes their life in the UK because of gambling.”

The club put the ‘Gambling with Lives’ logo on the front of their men’s first team shirt as a statement against the saturation of gambling sponsorship in the game.

As part of the programme, the men’s first-team goalkeeper, Lewis Carey, shared his own experience of gambling harm. He became addicted to gambling as an 18-year-old shortly after signing his first professional contract. He said that it took a severe toll on his mental, physical and financial wellbeing for several years.

The government is reviewing the Gambling Act 2005 to ensure gambling regulation is fit for the digital age. Banning advertising on football shirts is one measure it is considering. My message to government is: “Just do it”.

For more information about ‘Gambling with Lives’ see their website www.gamblingwithlives.org