2023 Recap: More Bets

Paqueta, the West Ham player, tries to catch up with his opponent, but he makes a naive intervention in the middle of the field and receives a yellow card. This scene would have gone unnoticed under normal circumstances, but it did not happen.

On March 12, 2023, several football betting outlets in Brazil received a large number of bets on Lucas Paqueta, the English West Ham player, receiving a warning. Immediately, the integrity and transparency systems of those offices were alerted and tracked the identity and locations of the bettors, and it became clear that Most of them came from new accounts, located on the island of Paquita in Brazil.

According to the British Daily Mail , gamblers placed huge bets on Paqueta's warning, amounting to 1,000 pounds sterling, and this required the English Federation to interrogate the player, who denied his involvement in any activity related to betting, and that committing this mistake was merely a failed attempt on his part to comply. Under the instructions of his coach, who always asked him to provide defensive support to his teammates.

However, apart from this particular scene, football in general suffers from a clear threat from betting. In 2023 alone, it was revealed that Ivan Toni and Sandro Tonali, the English stars of Brentford and Newcastle, were involved in betting, along with a number of Italian Premier League players.

In fact, the biggest problem is not the involvement of these players, or others whose identities have not been revealed. But the problem is that these players are required to become billboards for the betting companies that sponsor their clubs, and are then punished if they decide to try the product they are promoting.

https://twitter.com/classicshirts/status/1646473524121333763?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1646473524121333763%7Ctwgr%5Ee2012b811a9c2c5f316bf6b9d8a99c97956a5516%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ida2at.com%2F4-most-important-football-scenes-in-2023%2F

This situation represents a strange double standard. At the same time that some clubs are still unable to give up sponsorship deals coming from international betting companies, the clubs’ denials indirectly contribute to promoting a destructive industry, the number of whose users has reached about 176 million users around the world in... Year 2023.

In the end, the above scenes certainly weren't the biggest football thing that happened in 2023, but they did give the average football fan the ability to follow events they wouldn't have cared about without football.

This is precisely what David Goldblatt, with whom we began our story, intended; Football may push its follower to pay attention to things outside his area of ​​interest, which he expects to not go beyond celebrating victories and sadness when losing, things such as the rise of a country as a major economic power in the world, the impact of flights on the environment, how institutions manage their financial crises, and their exploitation of stars to break into new markets, Or even identifying a negative phenomenon that could ruin the lives of millions.