Active Public Health & Healthcare Mental Health

Kicking the Habit: Historicising 'Addictive' Sport Sponsorship in Britain, 1965-2025

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine · University of Glasgow · University of Nottingham Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £1.7M
Period Sept 2024 — Aug 2030

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Sports fans in Britain are still routinely exposed to alcohol and gambling sponsorship, decades after tobacco sponsorship was banned—and this project will be the first to systematically map that history from the 1960s to 2025. The problem matters because marketing directly drives harmful behaviour. Among people with gambling problems, nine out of ten say marketing prompts unplanned betting; similar links exist for alcohol and tobacco. Yet while the tobacco ban is in place, alcohol and gambling sponsorship remains legal and widespread across football, rugby, cricket, Formula One, and tennis. The 2021–22 UK government gambling review explicitly examined sponsorship, but no historical study has yet traced how these industries built their relationships with sport. If this research succeeds, it will uncover the precedents and tactics that allowed health-harming sponsorship to become normalised. That historical evidence could inform future regulation—not just of gambling, but of alcohol sponsorship as well. The project is not developing a new intervention or treatment; it is providing the historical understanding that policymakers, campaigners, and sports bodies need to make evidence-based decisions about what kinds of sponsorship are acceptable in public life.

View original technical description
Sports sponsorship by the addictive industries of tobacco, alcohol, and gambling pressurises health services and damages lives. While tobacco sponsorship is no longer legal, sports fans are nevertheless still routinely exposed to sponsorship by the alcohol and gambling industries. The health dangers of this involvement are pressing. Marketing is shown to directly impact the behaviours of those vulnerable to health harms, prompting unplanned betting in nine out of ten people experiencing gambling problems. Similar impacts have been recorded for tobacco and alcohol use. This important project will be the first to systematically map and analyse professional sport sponsorship from a historical perspective. As such, it works towards Wellcome’s strategic goals by uncovering historical precedents as a means to mobilise better health outcomes. Stimulated by the 2021-22 UK governmental gambling review (that includes an examination of sponsorship), three leading experts within history and the social sciences analyse the tobacco, alcohol, and gambling industries’ relationships with five professional sports (football, rugby, cricket, formula one, tennis). From the first sports sponsorship deals of the mid-1960s to 2025, we scrutinise the involvement of sport and industry in sponsorship and interrogate what the production of health-harming behaviours means for sport, industry, and the interested public.

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Researchers

Alex Mold (EPMC Awardee)Anna Greenwood (EPMC Awardee)Heather Wardle (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Discovery Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.