Super Bowl: Gambling pretence maintained by banning Las Vegas advert

This Sunday the Oakland Raiders and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers meet in the 37th Super Bowl, the greatest annual pageant in American sport. But amid all the striving, all the thrills offered by these warriors of the National Football League lurks an absurdity: the NFL's pretence that the gridiron and gambling are God and Mammon, and that ne'er the twain must meet.

In fact, everyone knows that betting is part of American football's culture; even the NFL's website is operated by a company that posts Las Vegas odds on professional football games. No less than 40 per cent of the $2bn (£1.24bn) turnover of the sports gambling industry in Vegas – Nevada is the only state which allows the practice – is generated by the NFL. And that is only the legal tip of the iceberg.

Not surprisingly, the Super Bowl is the biggest betting event of the year.

It is also the biggest television advertising event, three hours of time-out-ridden mayhem during which 30-second spots cost an average $2m – some of them crafted mini-films to entertain an audience expected this weekend to top 125 million, almost half the US population. However, there is one ad they will not be seeing.

It is the one from the Las Vegas tourism promotion board, and the NFL has banned it. Why? The demon gambling of course. No matter that American football is among the most violent of all sports, where the average career lasts just three-and-a-half years. No matter that it has problems of substance abuse and off-field violence. What matters above all is the fiction that the sport is gambling free.

No matter that not a single punter features in the ads. The very words Las Vegas, the fastest growing metropolis in the Union, are enough to make the prim gentlemen who run the NFL tremble with horror. Who knows, if word got out, those ruthless betting czars might even try to fix the Super Bowl's result.

Now, there is no denying this sort of thing has happened. The gambling fraternity tried unsuccessfully to rig the 1946 NFL Championship game (as Super Bowls were called in those days) between the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears. That episode of course pales beside baseball's thrown World Series of 1919, when players from the overwhelmingly favoured Chicago White Sox of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson took the syndicates' silver to lose to the Cincinnati Reds.

But that happened because Charles Comiskey, the miserly owner of the White Sox, paid his men peanuts. These days NFL players earn so much that risking disgrace and a lifetime ban for a bribe simply isn't worth it. The League paid $2.45bn in wages and benefits for 2001. Starting players made an average of $2.4m, the best quarterbacks up to $15m (£9.3m or £170,000 a week). Kickers come much cheaper; but what guarantee is there that a game will hinge on a field goal or a conversion? Betting, in short, is a much exaggerated demon.

How different from Britain. Yes, there is an almighty fuss when Michael Owen admits losing tens of thousands of pounds gambling; but no one talks of banning him. Much sports gambling in the US is still under the counter. High street betting shops do not exist; if you want odds on a big US fixture, you might as well go to Ladbrokes or William Hill as Harry the Horse in Vegas.

Worst of all though, the NFL's objections to gambling miss the point. It is the classic human ploy of making much of a non-existent problem to deflect attention from real ones: in the NFL's case substance abuse and excessive violence, sometimes leading to unnecessary, devastating injury.

The NFL argues it operates one of the strictest drugs policies in sport, introduced in the 1980s at the demand of the players themselves. Each of them is now randomly tested once or twice a year, off-season included. But a problem still exists, greater than any risk posed by gamblers and the men in Vegas – where Sunday's line, incidentally, is the Raiders by eight points.