The growing link between gambling and racist abuse of Premier League players

In the flurry of abhorrent messages sent to four Premier League footballers at the weekend, a notable one was shared by Wolverhampton Wanderers forward Tolu Arokodare on his Instagram stories.

A screenshot of a direct message, sent within an hour of Wolves’ 1-0 away defeat by Crystal Palace, included vile, racist language. But there was also the inference that Arokodare, who missed a penalty at Selhurst Park, had spoiled a bet. “F***ing n***** sold my parlay again,” it began. A parlay is the U.S. term for a bet made up of a series of selections, best known in the UK as an accumulator.

The account behind the abuse predictably no longer exists, but the message illustrated a concerning pattern. In a sport that has grown increasingly attached to the gambling industry over the past two decades, there is now an undercurrent to some of the racist abuse. A bet is lost, and players are angrily blamed, along with racist or discriminatory slurs.

Arokodare will not have been alone in receiving such hate this season. The Athletic has spoken with officials from two Premier League clubs, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to protect relationships. Both have noted a pattern in the abuse — a lost bet has acted as the trigger for racism aimed at players.

It is, of course, all part of a wider problem that football struggles to stem. Kick It Out, the anti-racism campaign group, says incidents of online abuse reported to them in the 2025-26 campaign are up by 44 per cent compared to the same point last season. They are now at record levels.

The UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU), the body responsible for taking action against abusers, has also noted a steep climb in statistics. In data given to The Athletic, there have already been 198 reports that have met the legal hate crime threshold this season, close to the 212 connected to football in all of last season.

They do not record if there is a gambling reference included, but the mid-season figures for 2025-26 are steeply up from the 92 recorded at the halfway point of last term. The 2023-24 season saw 423 incidents, but 89 were related to the men’s European Championship held in Germany, potentially an ominous sign ahead of this summer’s World Cup.

Four more reports came during a grim weekend in the Premier League. After Chelsea’s Wesley Fofana and Burnley’s Hannibal Mejbri were targeted after their teams drew 1-1 on Saturday, Sunderland winger Romaine Mundle was targeted after Sunday’s 3-1 defeat at home by Fulham. That came at the same point as Arokodare was discovering his own racist abuse online. The four players, all Black, were supported by their clubs in public statements condemning the abuse and promising a pursuit of criminal action.

“There is absolutely no place for racial abuse, either online or in person, and anyone who believes they can hide behind their keyboards should think again,” chief constable Mark Roberts, head of the UKFPU, said in a statement on Monday.

Football has a problem, and, inadvertently, gambling is now one root cause.

Christopher Wreh was part of a Tamworth side that gave Tottenham Hotspur an almighty fright in the FA Cup third round last January. It took extra time for the Premier League team to finally emerge through an anxious test at the Lamb Ground, eventually winning 3-0 in a fixture broadcast live across the UK.

It ought to have been among Wreh’s most cherished days in professional football, but one look through his social media in the aftermath tainted it all.

“This is the last thing I expected to see when I opened Instagram,” Wreh, son of the former Arsenal forward of the same name, wrote on his X account. Attached was a screenshot of a direct message sent anonymously to Wreh. Among the vile racist abuse was the complaint that a £20 bet had been lost.

The Instagram profile was called “Dunztagram”. Soon enough, Wreh had been sent further messages identifying the account holder as Harry Dunbar, a 20-year-old living in Whiteley, Hampshire.

Dunbar was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated malicious communications. In police questioning, he admitted he had sent the racist abuse because he had lost a bet on Tamworth’s FA Cup tie with Tottenham. He pleaded guilty at Portsmouth Magistrates Court in April.

“Harry Dunbar lost a simple bet, and in a moment of anger, chose to break the law,” senior crown prosecutor Gavin Sumpter said at the point of sentencing last June, citing the “vile and hateful language” used.

Dunbar was given a three-year football banning order, preventing him from attending any professional matches played in the UK until 2028. “We hope this case makes it clear to like-minded individuals that such behaviour will not be tolerated,” Sumpter added.

It remains the one case brought to a conclusion by the UKFPU where there has been a direct link drawn between gambling and racist abuse, but it does not stand in isolation. Far greater numbers are thought to come from accounts set up overseas and, therefore, beyond the jurisdiction of UK authorities.

Football has increasingly become a sport synonymous with gambling. Eleven of the 20 Premier League clubs currently have a betting firm as their primary shirt sponsor. Those arrangements must cease ahead of next season, but partnerships will still be able to exist through sleeve and training kit sponsorships, as well as advertising on pitch and interview boards.

A study from the University of Bristol found that 27,440 betting messages were evident during the opening weekend of this Premier League season alone, across TV, radio and social media. A YouGov poll, released in January 2024, found that 67 per cent of football followers based in the UK placed at least one bet on their sport, with 14 per cent staking at least £100 each month.

There is a wider interest from international markets, too. The gradual legalisation of sports betting in the U.S. has created a booming market, with the American Gaming Association’s annual report for 2024, as reported by Sports Business Journal, saying that $150billion of sports bets were taken across the year.

That has created a new interest and, in turn, new sparks for abuse. The more that is staked, the more open players become to the online hate.

“There’s a number of changes that we’ve seen to the ways in which threats and abuse are proliferating online,” says Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and chief executive of Moonshot, the AI firm established to tackle online threats. Moonshot has not studied the Premier League in isolation, but has worked across sport for the past three years.

“Number one is a recent change in the last two years. We’re just seeing that general volumes of online abuse for any event are at an all-time high. So, year on year for the last three years, we see higher and higher volumes of threats and abuse online. And already 2026 is unprecedented.

“Another major shift we’re seeing is what I would call instant escalation, which is that a single event, whether it’s on the pitch, whether it’s an interview, whether it’s a statement by an influencer about the event, a single event or interview can trigger tens of thousands of abusive messages and threats across platforms within a matter of hours. That used to be a dynamic that would sometimes take several days to build, and now it’s happening within a matter of minutes and hours. This is a pattern that we’ve seen outside of sport as well.”

Fofana, Hannibal, Mundle and Arokodare can all attest to that. Fofana was shown a red card before Chelsea were pegged back to draw 1-1, Mundle missed a big chance when Sunderland were goalless, and Arokodare saw a penalty saved before Wolves eventually fell to defeat. In that, there are parallels with the racist abuse directed at Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after England lost the final of Euro 2020 on penalties to Italy.

A Kick It Out spokesperson said: “We are concerned by the links between racist abuse aimed at players and betting. We know of fans who have received banning orders for this behaviour and have gone through our education programme to understand the impact of their actions.

“There can never be any excuse for discrimination, and anyone found guilty of sending it to players should be held accountable.”

Footballers are not alone in being targeted. Tennis players, too, regularly find themselves on the receiving end of abuse from angry gamblers. A number of stakeholders, including the International Tennis Federation (ITF), joined together in December 2023 to launch the ThreatMatrix, a programme designed to monitor social media for abusive content across X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and TikTok.

A subsequent report, covering all of 2024, found 40 per cent of all detected abuse was related back to gambling. Ukrainian tennis player Elina Svitolina spoke out about the subject in August of last year, highlighting racial abuse aimed at her husband, Gael Monfils, who is Black.

“To all the bettors: I’m a mum before I’m an athlete,” she wrote on her Instagram account. “The way you talk to women — to mothers — is SHAMEFUL. If your mothers saw your messages, they’d be disgusted.” British tennis player Katie Boulter also shared messages she had received last summer. Among them was one that read: “Go to hell, I lost money my mother sent me.”

“From the U.S. context, and especially after the legalisation of sports betting in the U.S., we found last year that in roughly 30 per cent of the threat cases we were dealing with in U.S. college sports, it was readily apparent that the individual behind the threat had placed a wager on the game’s outcome,” adds Ramalingam.

“Now I’d expect the actual percentage to be even higher than that because most people don’t broadcast their gambling losses.

“We also tend to see an intersection between people who are talking about gambling losses and conspiracy theories about the sport, about the athlete, about the wider gambling industry. They’re basically looking for something to blame.

“And, as with outside of sport, the second you start to blend in conspiracy theories, it can take you down a really dangerous path for those that are actually at the receiving end of the abuse.”

A Meta spokesperson said: “No one should be subjected to racist abuse, and we remove this content when we find it. We have removed the violating messages and accounts which have been reported, and we’re continuing our investigation whilst in direct contact with the clubs.

“We’ve developed several tools to help protect people from having to see abuse, including Hidden Words, which filters offensive comments and message requests. No one thing will stop racist behaviour overnight, but we’ll continue working to protect our community from abuse and cooperate with police investigations.”

Arokodare, like Wreh last season, has shown the world a new reality facing sportspeople — and one of the new root causes of the growing online racist abuse.

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