The Football Association has announced it will end all sponsorship arrangements with betting companies.
Is this the start of the separation between sport and gambling?
Declan Lynch of the Sunday Independent has written extensively about the negative impact of gambling on society. He thinks it will be "a very slow process."
"To have the actual governing body of football itself in a relationship with a betting company gives you a sense of the extraordinary level to which the gambling industry effectively owns football and other sports."
You only have to look at the relentless betting adverts during televised football matches to see the hold the industry has over the sport.
"The gambling industry is not cleverly infiltrating the game, it's doing it absolutely openly and with great fanfare," Declan said. "It's one of those things that's so big that nobody can see it anymore. You've created this generation of young men who are immensely vulnerable. Online betting in particular is such an addictive thing."
Declan Jordan, senior lecturer in economics at UCC, thinks society needs to take gambling addiction far more seriously.
"There's no doubt that gambling imposes more on families and loved ones who have to deal with the consequences of it. It's a particularly insidious form of addiction."
"The way we normally deal with addictions from a policy perspective is we tax them. In Ireland, we don't do that - in fact the tax on gambling is minuscule. We turn a blind eye to the negative effects of gambling in society. We leave it up to the industries to regulate themselves."
