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Comment by raffa667 | Hacker News Reader

Same happened in Italy, so all betting sites turned into "news" site so you would have teams being spored by "betting_company_name news". Useless. There's a proposal to be back to previous type of sponsorship.

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This argument matches a HN (and IT world) idea that the law is algorithmic or autistic. If Italy's government wanted to enforce that law, I'm sure they could.

If the law banned selling beer without a license, you can't sell a pen for $20 and include a free six pack, claiming 'I'm just selling pens!'. Regulatory agencies, prosecutors, and judges aren't idiots, and neither is your lawyer.

Same with the drinks companies, they switched to explicitly advertising their zero alcohol beers.

It just now clicked with me why they are doing that. I've been wondering why they are pushing them so hard. Barely anyone seems to buy NA beer.

I imagine like many things, market penetration is uneven.

I have a subscription for NA beers, my friends and I drink them when out and about, etc. We're young-ish Americans in New York, I suppose the news says we drink a lot less than previous generations.

I'm not saying the market doesn't exist, just that the marketing never seemed to match the size of the market. It's the old dirty open secret of the alcohol industry that their market was never really social drinkers, and I've just never seen the equivalent consumer regularly going through multiple 6 packs of NA beer a week.

Last big social event I went to a few weeks ago, the coolers were packed with Athletic Brewing and Liquid Death along with a few off-brands of flavored sparkling water.

Post pandemic, in my little bubble at least, I almost never see people drinking beer anymore.

> Barely anyone seems to buy NA beer.

Not true around me. They are pretty popular. And I stopped drinking them few years ago, when I realized I drink 5-6 a day and it is probably too much.

Since I became a parent I've started buying nonalcoholic beer fairly often. It certainly helps that they've gotten A LOT better in the last 5-10 years.

I don't go to a lot of parties, but at the parties I do go to I'm starting to see non-alcoholic beers become a regular thing. From none, to one variety, to two...

Seeing NA beers at a party that also has an open bar is neat.

Do grocery stores sell them? If so, people buy them.

Do they add more choices over time? If so, they sell well.

I notice a big shift in my social circles the last few years. Non alcholic beer has gained a lot of popularity. I was advised by my doctor not to drink more than one beer a week due to an health issue O was having, and I was a little worried about the social implications, especially in places where I did not want to talk about my health. Hardly anyone noticed or cared that I went for non alcoholic beers for a year.

Which is a bit of a shame, given the terrible health effects of alcohol.

This is genuinely funny. I have to admire the chutzpah.

That is in response to an actual trend. Alcohol has fallen out of favor these last few years.

It's a response to laws that prohibit advertising of alcohol in certain countries at certain times of the day. There may be a trend towards these products, but the prohibition prompted the advertising change.

Look at diageo stocks over 5 years, for ex. It is a real trend that people drink less in general: boomers the least, then genz.

That might be considered an intended result of the rule - encouraging more non-alcoholic drinking.

Norway banned alcohol advertisements in 1975. Companies similarly tried to get around by advertising by using water bottles, or merchandise, so they the law was amended in 1997 to ban those, which seems to have been successful.

Because the premier league introduced this voluntarily rather than in response to specific legislation, I doubt this kind of loophole finding will happen. A team skirting the rules with a technicality will just be called out and punished (and teams will be afraid of that because the league and its brand and the things connected to it, like TV coverage, are worth huge amounts of money)

Still, better than allowing actual players, which are idols and role models for many young men, to directly promote that filth on-air during and around a match.

But they allow Leveraged Forex Betting like Everton’s sponsor? This decision has absolutely nothing to do with ethics my friend.

Putting brokerages in the same category as outright sportsbetting is not making your judgement look good.

Reminds me of the pokersite .net ads on poker coverage. The .net site was no money play gambling, the .com site they wouldn't mention was real money gambling, probably not legal in your jurisdiction.

I was at the World Series of Poker when this change was made.

The major sites had anticipated the decision not to allow sponsorship by "real money" gambling sites and had registered their .net equivalents. Pokerstars.net, fulltiltpoker.net, etc.

.net stickers were printed in dozens of different colours, backgrounds, fonts, and players were instructed to take a .net sticker that most closely matched their branded clothing.

Of course, not everyone had their ducks in a row for the decision, and some of the domain names were still available. An enterprising entrepreneur registered Paddypowerpoker.net, and perhaps others, and turned it into a porn site.

Perhaps they should ban news sites that cover gambling.

it's a cat and mouse thing, but the truth is that there is no will to actually do it, because the party who championed this has since moved to other things, and clubs _want_ the money from betting companies because they're struggling to keep up with other leagues (especially since those sponsors _are_ allowed in other leagues).

"Keep up with other leagues" - is it to pay the top-rated players ?

Party!!!

It is. And while it is true that Italian Serie A struggles to be financially competitive with other top leagues, the important "detail" to keep in mind is that no football league is financially competitive with Premier League, and the gap only grows bigger and bigger every year.

Edit: also stadiums, but issues with building new stadiums are often caused by bureaucracy. Also the deals from bettong sites are not that great to be deciding factor of club can build a new stadium or not.

You would think the situation would sort of fix itself over time where premier league ends up being expensive and serie A starts looking like a more attractive deal. E.g. in NBA if you were a billionaire actually seriously interested on winning a championship (many owners aren't, granted), the worst thing you could do is buy the knicks or the lakers. The best thing you could do is buy some small market team for an order of magnitude or two lower price and then just dump the rest of your cash into securing contracts with the best players and coaches available. Plus most of europe is on the same or similar time zone. And there is the whole champions league where many european fans are already used to following teams out of these other leagues.

If you buy a cheap Italian club and spend a ton of money you will do well in the national league and go to the UEFA champions league.

But the amount of money a random premier league team gets for their league is tenfold, so you still will struggle to compete.

This is one of the reasons there's a handful of non-premier league teams that have reached the UEFA champions league final in the last 10-20 years, while in the 80s you had random teams from all europe winning the Champion's Cup.

Concentration of wealth without NBA-inspired salary caps is self reinforcing and killing European footbal.

This is the hypocrisy of the football fans.

They absolutely hate how football is a business but they want the 100 million eurodollar striker!

Players wages, players price and fees to various intermediaries which have bubbled up through the years, yeah.

It is easy enough to ban obvious workaraounds as well if the will to do it is there.

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