On 27 May 2026, the Advertising Standards Authority published two gambling advertising rulings on the same day, one of which involved a retired footballer turned pundit Thierry Henry, late of Arsenal and France. This comes on the heels of another decision from autumn 2025, involving another retired footballer turned pundit, Gary Neville. One was upheld, one was not. The difference? Youth appeal. Or rather, the number of under-18s following you on social media. It turns out that in the world of advertising regulation, being less popular with teenagers is actually an advantage.
Let us be clear about one thing from the outset. In terms of footballing ability, style, grace and sheer aesthetic appeal, Thierry Henry and Gary Neville are not in the same postcode, let alone the same league. Henry glided across pitches like a Parisian catwalk model who had accidentally wandered onto the turf; Neville scurried down the right flank like a man perpetually late for a bus. Henry is two years younger, considerably more handsome, and scored 175 Premier League goals to Neville's five. Five! And yet it is Neville, not Henry, whom the ASA considers too appealing to the youth of today. There is no justice, although to be fair, Neville is probably the better pundit.
Gary Neville: The John Bull of football punditry
In October 2025, the ASA upheld a complaint against Bonne Terre Ltd (trading as Sky Bet) concerning a promoted tweet featuring Gary Neville discussing Premier League title predictions on The Overlap podcast. Sky Bet argued strenuously but reasonably that Neville was "long retired", having hung up his boots in 2011, and was now known primarily as a pundit and political commentator. They produced reams of data: just 1.2% of The Overlap's audience was aged 13–17; his Twitter followers skewed 53% towards the 25–34 bracket; his top hashtags included #generalelectionnow.
But the ASA was unmoved. Despite accepting that Neville's punditry placed him in the "moderate risk" category, it found that over 135,000 social media follower accounts registered to under-18s followed him across platforms, with the true figure potentially higher. That absolute number was sufficient to constitute "strong appeal" under the CAP Guidance, and the complaint was upheld.
However, this was the regulatory equivalent of disallowing a goal for being offside because the striker's big toe was millimeters ahead of defender's nose. Why? Because the figure 135,000 was based on the assumption that all the accounts registered across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok all belonged to separate individuals. The ASA accepted there might be some double counting but found that "in the absence of data indicating that duplication significantly reduced the follower count for a personality, we considered advertisers should err on the side of assuming that all were individual followers." Imagine if Gary Neville published an ad claiming to have over 135,000 followers across 4 or 5 different platforms; the ASA would insist that he prove that all of these belonged to separate individuals with no double counting!
Thierry Henry: All va va voom and Gallic swagger
The Betway ruling tells a different story. An Instagram post from November 2025 featured Henry discussing Arsenal's title chances as Betway's "global ambassador". The complainant, a researcher from the University of Bristol, challenged it on the same grounds, i.e. that Theirry has strong appeal to the under 18s, despite being French and having played for Arsenal.
Betway argued that Henry, aged 48 at the time, had left the Premier League in 2007 and retired from professional football entirely in 2014. His punditry was primarily for CBS Sports, an American network unavailable in the UK, with only occasional guest spots on Sky Sports' Monday Night Football. Crucially, Henry was active only on Instagram, where his 4.32 million followers included an estimated 19,483 UK-based under-18s — well below the 100,000 rule of thumb in the CAP Guidance.
The ASA accepted this estimate as reasonable and concluded that Henry's social media profile did not indicate strong appeal to under-18s. It also found that viral clips of his CBS and MNF appearances centred on match analysis rather than youth-friendly humour, and his largely non-UK following meant many views would come from abroad. The complaint was not upheld.
Oddschecker: Kane and Haaland are a different matter entirely
Published on the same day, and triggered by the same complainant from Bristol University, the Oddschecker ruling provided a stark contrast. Two Instagram posts from Oddschecker featured images of Harry Kane and Erling Haaland, both active Premier League-era players at or near the peak of their careers (although Kane is clearly past his peak, having left the mighty Tottenham Hotspur). Oddschecker argued the posts were "editorial" rather than advertising and pointed to account-level age restrictions.
The ASA dismissed both arguments. The posts promoted the placing of bets through Oddschecker and therefore fell within the CAP Code. As for age-gating, the ASA noted that Instagram's AI detection of underage users takes time to identify suspect accounts, during which under-18s can access 18+ content. Kane and Haaland were categorised as "high risk" of strong appeal to under-18s — Kane as a UK footballer captaining England, Haaland as a non-UK "star" with a significant UK audience. The ads therefore breached the Code.
What does this mean? It's time for VAR.
These three rulings together paint a clear picture. The ASA's approach to the "strong appeal" test in gambling advertising is driven overwhelmingly by hard data: absolute numbers of under-18 social media followers, platform demographics, and whether a personality is active or retired. For gambling operators, the lesson is simple. If you want to use a footballer in your ads, choose one whose best days are well behind him, whose social media following is modest, and whose punditry appears on foreign networks. In short, choose Thierry Henry over Gary Neville.
And if that is the on-field decision of the ASA, it's clearly time to call in VAR, because that seems like a clear and obvious referring error, if ever there was one.
