As a football betting enthusiast, you have the opportunity to bet on football matches all year round if you want it. Yes, professional soccer league betting is always available somewhere in the world. As you might know, that could be a good thing or a bad thing.

If you have complete control over your football betting activities, there is nothing wrong with betting on matches regularly. The term "control" refers to you not allowing any form of gambling to interfere with your life. That typically means restricting your football betting bankroll to your discretionary money, money that remains after your bills are paid. Then, it's all good. If there would ever come a time that you would lose control over your football betting, you will hopefully seek help getting things back in order.

One of the first things you should do if you suspect you might have a gambling problem is seek out some form of self-exclusion resource. By finding and using a self-exclusion resource, you would make it clear to the people in your life that you want to be responsible about the way you live your life.

The rest of this article is going to focus on two self-exclusion resources you will immediately have at your disposal. Those resources are GamStop and Gamban.

GamStop Self-Exclusion Program

If your football betting activities are focused on online sportsbooks in the UK, you should have access to the GamStop Self-exclusion scheme. This would especially be true if your online bookmaker of choice is licensed by the UK Gambling Commission. If that's the case, it's very likely that your online bookmaker has subscribed as a member of GamStop. For information about GamStop, you can look for the GamStop logo or speak with a customer service representative.

Once you get access to the program, you can register for free. As part of the registration process, you will have to provide a lot of important personal information (full name, phone number, cell number, email address, etc.). This is the information that the GamStop program will use to block your access should you try to open any new sports betting accounts after your self-exclusion period starts. By the way, all of your active accounts will immediately be suspended.

Since the program is strictly voluntary, you get to decide how long you want your self-exclusion to last. Your options would be 6 months, 1 year, or years. Once it goes into effect, member UK gambling sites are supposed to deny you access to their gambling websites.

Of course, no program or system is perfect. GamStop is only available for online gamblers through online operators that are licensed with the UKGC and have subscribed to the GamStop scheme. As you can imagine, there are a lot of ways you could get around your self-exclusion.

The most obvious option would using non GamStop UK sites for online betting. Indeed, there are plenty of UK licensed operators that have been able to avoid GamStop membership because while it has been deemed mandatory as part of the licensing process, enforcement has been slow. Other GamStop-avoidence options would include:

  • Football betting through offshore sportsbook
  • Using Bitcoin only gambling sites
  • Betting through retail bookmakers
  • Opening accounts under other identities

The Gamban Option

If you feel committed to staying away from online football betting sites, you might want to consider using a self-exclusion software solution like Gamban.

Gamban is a downloadable software program that you can download on all the devices you use for your football betting activities. Once the program has been downloaded and activated, your devices will not be able to interact with any websites that can be identified as gambling sites. The self-exclusion is permanent as there is no way to remove the software from a hard drive.

Once again, no program or system is perfect. It should be pretty obvious that Gamban is a device-specific solution. If you were to be motivated to resume your football betting activities, you would just need to buy a new device or borrow one from a friend or relative.

Since neither of these self-exclusion programs offers you complete protection from problem gambling issues, we would recommend you use both options at the same time. While Gamban will cost you a little money, GamStop registration is free. The combination of these two programs would still not offer absolute protection, but it could be enough to keep you from betting football until you have your life back in order.

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