John Hartson has revealed that five EPL managers have approached him to speak to players about gambling problems.
The former Celtic striker had a well documented battle with gambling issues throughout his career and half jokingly claimed that he could have played for Real Madrid if it hadn’t been for his gambling issues.
Former Newcastle midfielder Kieron Dyer has given an insight into the gambling issues within the game and has claimed that debts played a part in the failure of the ‘Golden Generation’ to reach their full potential.
Build around a clutch of players at Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea much was expected of England during the first decade of the century but it seems that players had little to do other than lose fortunes in card schools.
With his book being serialised in the Daily Mail Dyer claimed: “I felt sorry for Michael (Owen). He had offered to be the bookmaker in Japan (2002 World Cup) and had taken the players’ bets.
“I’d done pretty well and had a couple of spectacular wins. I put £500 on South Korea to beat Italy in the knockout stages. Michael gave me odds of 16–1. The bet came in, so he owed me £8,500 straight away.
“But Michael made money from other people and probably came out around even in the end. In fact, he was probably a few quid up.”
He added: “The amounts of money that we gambled in my time with England grew more extreme as the years went by, until it got to the point where I thought there was a huge danger it was destabilising individuals and potentially affecting our results.
“People think it began in the Kevin Keegan era, but in my experience the levels of gambling under Keegan were fairly tame.
“The levels that we reached at Euro 2004 and some of the Euro 2008 qualifiers were just ridiculous, eye-wateringly huge.
“We were gambling such large sums that we knew we couldn’t possibly do it in public. So we gambled in each other’s rooms, behind locked doors.
“We were like clandestine drinkers, hiding ourselves to get wasted. Except the drug was gambling and there was a sizeable band of us that were addicted.
“There were four or five of us who played, but the sums were so large that I’m not going to name names. There were no limits on what we’d gamble or what we’d chase to win our money back if we lost.”
Hartson was reacting to the story on TalkSPORT.
