The "Voice of Football" celebrates his latest result
Betfair’s unique selling point is masterfully simple: punters are thicker than bookies, so you stand a better chance of winning if you’re betting against other fans rather than a massive moneymaking corporation. Obviously to prosper within this fan vs fan betting environment you need to be smarter (or luckier) than other punters, but thankfully there are plenty of idiots in the football-watching community.
Which brings us rather conveniently to Betfair’s latest recruit: Sky Sports’ Andy Gray. Although some football fans (cf. idiots in the football-watching community, above) truly believe Mr Gray to be an incisive and not-in-any-way-annoying commentator, the more sentient among us believe the opposite is true. He is, in this way, a bit like Marmite. Only more irritating. And repetitive.
Anyway, my personal bias aside, Betfair’s ambassadorial choice still looks rather misguided. The reason? He’s just not stupid enough.
Regardless of what fair-weather Sky-watchers like me think, there’s no denying that Andy Gray is respected by a lot of football fans. And that’s not what Betfair should be looking for.
As discussed above, the tempting thing about fan vs fan betting is the number of idiots out there who think they’re cleverer than bookies. While there’s an argument for using a divisive figure who gives punters something to argue about, I think there’s more sense in choosing someone who will remind the whole audience (and not just the Gray-haters) how many misguided, opinionated football fans there are out there; someone, basically, like Ian Wright. Come on he is ideal. This is the man who appeared in a ‘Chicken Tonight” ad.
Not only that Wrighty has form when it comes to gambling endorsements. Ladbrokes’ 2007 ad featured the former Gunner bantering excitedly (and contentiously) about football with Ally McCoist, Lee Dixon and Chris Kamara. The problem with that ad was that punters knew they’d never be betting against people like Wright or Dixon; they’d be trying to outsmart a bespectacled mathematician sitting in Ladbrokes HQ with a bank of stats and a big, Deep Blue like calculator.
With Betfair, of course, you can substitute ‘calculator’ for ‘can of lager’, and ‘bank of stats’ for ‘discussion down the pub’.
Ultimately, making the ‘Voice of Football’ (as his agents want us to call him) the voice of Betfair will only serve to remind fans of Andy Gray that there are people out there with more footballing knowledge than themselves. And I can safely say that no such problem would exist with former Gunner Wright.
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