You wrote:
> Gambling has always been a part of football. You mentioned the football pools, is this not gambling?
> In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth
Losing or winning a pint or two once or twice a week isn't the end of the world. The pools involved putting numbers into coupons and sending them off each week, it cost you £2 or whatever, and that was it for the week.
Modern sports betting seems (to my untrained uninterested eye) to be about extracting multiple bets of £20+ an hour, seemingly competing with the coke dealers which is apparently a very common part of football nowadays for the income, and using similar tactics.