Gambling in football: Does it really need this many big losers?

As the BA Boeing 747 reached its cruising altitude, the seat belt signs were switched off and the England footballers settled down for the 12-hour flight from Osaka to Heathrow. Some read, some dozed, some listened to music.

For a handful of others – although the World Cup was over for them, as they had lost the previous day to Brazil – there was one more game to play. Another hand of cards. And, at the end of it, they added up their losses.

It was then that Michael Owen – nicknamed "Lucky" for his ineptness at cards – reached for his cheque book and wrote out the sum of £30,000 to be paid to his team-mate, Kieron Dyer. The amount covered his cumulative losses since the "England card school" had started at the training camp in Dubai several weeks earlier. The young Newcastle United midfielder was so delighted with his winnings that he brandished the cheque up and down the aisle during the rest of the flight.

True story? Who knows. But after a week of lurid media allegation and speculation the myth has passed into footballing folklore, along with many other, well-documented tales of players' spectacular losses. By yesterday, a startling picture had emerged of the vast, often obscene, amounts of money that are routinely gambled – frittered – by some of Britain's young football players. It all felt slightly sordid, slightly nasty, immoral even.

Take the case of the Chelsea striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. Last October, he strolled into the Connoisseur Casino at the five-star Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, west London. It was past 1am and Hasselbaink, allegedly, quickly lost £50,000 on the tables. Hours later, he was with his team-mates on a bus to play away against Liverpool. They lost and he was substituted.

Or Jesper Gronkjaer, another Chelsea player who, it was claimed by the Sunday Mirror, has lost £112,000 at the same casino, working his way up from bets of £100. The list goes on with Eidur Gudjohnsen, an Icelandic striker, coming clean last week and admitting that he had lost £400,000 on roulette and blackjack.

It is not just foreign players. Indeed, they are believed to be "more disciplined" than the British footballers who, some say, will bet on almost anything. Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Manchester United's Dutch striker, exposed the betting culture at his club last week and Sir Bobby Charlton, a United director, said yesterday that gambling vast sums was "vulgar".

Unsurprisingly, the spotlight now is firmly on Owen, 23, who vehemently denies being the big-money loser on that England flight and losing other similarly large sums of money that were quoted yesterday. It was claimed he had placed bets worth £2.2m over the past few years, including several on the results of football matches.

Owen did, however, admit to "occasional" gambling and said in a statement: "I fully accept that high-profile sports people like me are a role model for youngsters and I would never encourage anyone to gamble."

As part of the Liverpool striker's response, a spokesman for Owen added: "Michael's father, Terry, has confirmed that he opened an offshore betting account [with bookmaker Victor Chandler] two or three years ago and has used this to place bets for friends and family, occasionally including Michael. Michael's gambling losses probably total around £30,000-£40,000 over the last couple of years." £40,000? A tidy sum – but nothing for a man whose wealth is estimated at between £5m and £9m.

However, in a clear sign that Owen and his handlers are concerned about the effect the gambling allegations will have on his clean-cut, boy-next-door image – and the lucrative endorsements that brings – the spokesman added: "Although the sums represent a tiny percentage of his earnings, Michael and his family know how important even £100 is to a normal household. It was not long ago that their family of seven lived together in a tiny house in a north Wales village."

Owen's management company, SFX, also released a statement which stated the player had raised "hundreds of thousands of pounds for charities" and was a devoted family man. Clearly they feared damage was being done to the earning power of Britain's second most marketable footballer after David Beckham.

The story – true or otherwise – of what happened on that England flight emerged last Monday, after Gudjohnsen's admission, in a newspaper column written by the former Ireland player Tony Cascarino, himself a big gambler. Cascarino did not name the England player but remarked matter-of-factly that £30,000 had been handed over. Within days, the rumour mill was naming Owen, who owns horses and was known to like a bet.

More importantly, it raised the debate over the effect of gambling in sport. It is nothing new, of course. There have always been card schools, there have always been long hours to kill on the way to games and there have always been wayward players such as Stan Bowles, who even tried to take a bet on whether he would stop betting, or more recently the Millwall striker Steve Claridge.

What was different this time was the eye-catching amounts involved – obviously fuelled by the astronomical wages footballers now earn – and the intervention of the former England captain Tony Adams, who raised the level of the debate on Wednesday by describing gambling as an addiction reaching alarming levels in the game.

Adams – who was to be honoured at the Football Writers' Association's annual dinner last night – said: "They [the addicts] lose their self-respect and before you know where they are, they are nicking money out of their kids' savings to have a bet." It was the kind of statement that made headlines – and blew a hole in the claim by another former player, Andy Gray, who said: "Players have always gambled relative to the amount they earned."

Adams – a recovering alcoholic – has established his own charity, Sporting Chance, which treats sportsmen suffering from addictions. Its chief executive, Peter Kay, said one of the problems with gambling was that it went unrecognised – partly because the signs were less obvious than with alcohol and drugs and partly because it was so ingrained in football. "In truth, some football chairmen would gladly drive the players to the casinos as long as they played well the next day," he said.

Paul Merson, a former team-mate of Adams and a man who has admitted to problems with gambling, drugs and alcohol, said it was unsurprising that more players were betting. "What can footballers do? They can't drink, they can't take drugs, they can't smoke.They have to have something to do. Some people can have a bet and walk away and then you get other people like me who have to keep on chasing, chasing and chasing."

And the number who are chasing is on the increase. Graham Taylor, the Aston Villa manager, said: "I saw a quote from David Davies of the Football Association the other day saying that he and Sven Goran Eriksson will deal with it. But real gambling is an addiction. With all due respect to David and Sven, it will take more than a few words to deal with it."

Taylor, unlike managers such as Liverpool's Gerard Houllier and Arsenal's Arsene Wenger, allows gambling on the team coach – although he insists it be for small amounts. Even this, according to former manager Tommy Docherty, can create a problem. "If a player has lost a lot of money to another it cannot do too much for team spirit," he said.

The FA said yesterday it had no intention of taking any action against Owen as he had not broken any rules. Players are only banned from betting on matches in which they take part or influence.

But as for the player himself, the question was clear. Does he really want to gamble on causing any more damage to that carefully cultivated image?