There is no doubt about the sporting issue of the moment. We ought to be talking about the opening day of the Flat racing season, or the prospects for football's World Cup, but the British sporting scene is still dominated by talk of gambling: who has been doing it, who should be doing it, and how it can be policed.
This morning the sports minister, Richard Caborn, will be the keynote speaker at the "Integrity in Sports Betting" conference at Twickenham.
Caborn will address sports administrators and bookmakers, and what has been billed as an "anti-cheating summit" will thereafter seek to find mutually acceptable ways of minimising the effect of gambling-related corruption on sport.
The motivations of both sides are clear: the sports administrators will be keen to show that the opportunities for players to gamble on their chosen sport can be stamped out, and the bookmakers want to reassure the public (and the punters) that inside information is not now, and will not be in the future, allowed to influence the markets on sporting events.
Wayne Rooney's adventures in gambling are the reason that what might have been a low-profile get-together is now attracting so much attention. But there has never been any suggestion that the young England striker was placing wagers on events in which he was involved. What is exercising Caborn and his colleagues is the notion that others may be tempted in the future.
Horse racing has been grappling with these issues almost since the inception of the sport, and shenanigans in Asia have raised awareness in cricket. Football is following down a well-worn path. Every player at the World Cup will be asked to sign a document which asserts that they will not gamble on any aspect of the forthcoming competition. The problem, which applies equally to domestic football and other sports, is: how is such a promise to be kept?
Total transparency is the obvious solution. But that demands that the personal accounts of sportsmen and women should be open to permanent scrutiny, whether or not they are suspected of committing any offence. Think of the fun the tabloids could have with such details, even assuming that the accounts were free of any gambling records: there will be headlines of what so-and-so spent on suits, or underwear, and the paparazzi will have their lives made much easier.
Administrators will insist, quite properly, that such information should be made known only to authorised rule-enforcers; but moles can spring up as easily in back offices as back gardens. Transparency would also have to apply to the bookmakers, who may be compelled to put information into the public domain which their clients would prefer remained private. Business is hardly likely to boom as a result.
The alternative is the 'elephant in the room' scenario: if you pretend that a problem is not there at all, perhaps it will go away. This optimistic point of view can be ascribed both to bookmakers and sports administrators: the former insist that client privacy is paramount, always has been and always should be; the latter insist that their sport is pure and will remain so.
Even in a society in which personal data is both valuable and prolific, there remain rules governing its dissemination. Should a sporting body approach a bookmaker for information about wagers, under current data protection rules the bookmaker would be forbidden from providing the details. This is good news from the point of view of privacy, but bad news for those interested in corruption-free sport.
The City has faced these problems for decades, but the introduction of insider-trading legislation has gone some way towards addressing them. With betting markets increasingly resembling financial trading markets, the adoption of similar policies in sport may be the best way forward.
Some bookmakers advocate what might be termed the 'third way', not total transparency or total privacy, but agreements between sporting bodies and betting firms to share - in confidence - details about particular sporting events. According to Mark Davies, of Betfair, one of the leading contemporary firms, this might be the best method for applying "best practice from the financial markets to sports betting".
That is the right direction to be heading. But such bilateral agreements would apply only to individual firms and individual sports: punters would know that they were betting with a straight firm, but unscrupulous players could always find a less reputable bookie to take their bet. Over to you, Mr Caborn.
www.telegraph.co.uk
