Australian Open tennis to dump online gambling courtside adverts in 2017

Court-side advertisements, which have been criticised as promoting gambling and thereby contributing indirectly to the spectre of match-fixing, are to be discontinued in 2017 from the Australian Open tennis championships, Tennis Australia has confirmed.

William Hill Australia is in line to feel the immediate pain of the ban, with its deal with Tennis Australia to advertise in January dropped.

Tennis Australia confirmed today (Friday) that it would no longer offer “on-court signage” to the betting agency.

The ads were criticised in January this year after the BBC and BuzzFeed revealed evidence of widespread match-fixing at the top level of world tennis (see previous  reports).

It should be noted here that William Hill was not implicated in the match-fixing allegations.

However, the expose boosted condemnation of the company’s 2015 deal with Tennis Australia, in which William Hill became the competition’s “official betting partner.”

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