British bookmakers set for billion pound World Cup

LONDON, May 23: England's inspirational striker is on crutches less than three weeks before the World Cup soccer tournament begins and may or may not play a match.

The England manager, for whom the World Cup will be the last job before he steps down, has called up a 17-year-old he hasn't even seen play.

Predicting England's footballing fortunes is never easy, but a lot of money will ride on those predictions.

British bookmakers are preparing for up to a billion pounds (1.89 billion dollar) in bets on the June 9 to July 9 World Cup in Germany, with wagers ranging from whose ''Golden Boot'' will score most goals in the tournament, to how many corner kicks in a game, and even what haircut England captain David Beckham will sport.

Betting in Britain has always been popular, but the 2001 abolition of tax on the gambler and the growth of online betting has seen an increase in annual turnover from 7 billion pounds in 2000 to about 50 billion pounds, analysts say.

And the soccer World Cup is the highlight.

''Britain is the world centre for bookmaking, and the world's biggest betting exchanges are based in Britain; that's where most of the money on the World Cup will be spent,'' Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams, a senior gambling adviser to the UK government, told Reuters in an interview.

Although most of the betting in Britain still takes place in gambling shops along the high street, more and more people are opting to bet via the Internet, over the telephone or through interactive television.

Access to satellite and cable television carrying live sport also allows people to bet, throughout a game, from their own home.

''People now bet, sat at home, during the match, watching it on TV,'' said Vaughan Williams from Nottingham Trent University.

''They used to bet just once before the match, but now they can bet during it, and there are so many things to bet on.'' Graham Sharpe, media spokesman for the William Hill bookmakers, said betting had also become more popular in recent years due to the variety of events people could bet on.

''People who have never before had an interest in who wins the 2.30 at Sandown (race course) can now bet on reality TV and football,'' he said. Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney's broken foot is a major doubt hanging over England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson's team, and the uncertainty has been reflected in the number of bets placed in recent weeks.

The 20-year-old is odds-on to miss the tournament, according to William Hill, but the surprise selection of Arsenal's teenage striker, Theo Walcott, who has yet to make his Premier League debut, has already made up for Rooney's injury, as far as the bookies are concerned.

''We've been taking bets from everything from Theo Walcott taking his driving test to winning the Golden Boot,'' Sharpe said. ''He is attracting just as much interest as we would have expected Rooney to do.'' COMPETITIVE ODDS Vaughan Williams says betting is now an integral part of the leisure experience in Britain, with betters making more money than ever before due to the removal of tax and the competitive odds set by rival bookmakers.

Ladbrokes, another British bookmaker, says it handles more than a million bets a day in its shops and has 2 million registered online customers in over 200 countries who are offered bets in 18 currencies.

Critics, however, are worried by the continuing growth of betting, on behalf of both the punter and the sport.

The ability to place bets throughout a game increases the likelihood of gamblers running up bigger debts as they chase a winning result.

On a larger scale, soccer's world governing body FIFA has been forced to set up a new company to detect suspect betting patterns in response to a betting scandal that broke in Germany last year.

In Germany, referee Robert Hoyzer was found guilty of fixing matches in a 2 million euro (2.58 million dollar) betting fraud case that has embarrassed World Cup hosts Germany.

But Vaughan Williams said the game was now more transparent than ever before.

''Everything you do now is monitored,'' he said. ''They know where you bet, how much you bet. Before, when it was just in a shop, it could never be controlled.

''(Cheating) was there before, you just didn't know about it.''

Reuters