James Lawton: Owen's fondness for a bet is the least of football's ills

Liverpool striker's harmless hobby pales into insignificance when compared with irresponsibility and conflicts of interest that are rife at game's highest level

Do you really want to know the problem of Michael Owen and his liking for a flutter? He is a young footballer who earns several millions of pounds a year. This sticks in the gullet of a lot of people, and not least those who populate football boardrooms and will never quite understand how it is that somebody who kicks a ball, however brilliantly, can earn quite so much money.

If Owen operated 40-odd years ago and spent most of his spare time hanging round the bookies' shop after training – before shuffling off to the dogs of a night time – and periodically showed up at the club offices looking for a "sub" on his wages fixed at something less than £20 a week, the worst he could expect would be a patronising lecture from the club secretary.

As it is, Owen is a knowledgeable young racehorse owner. His visits to John Gosden's stable, for example, have invariably impressed the experienced trainer with their spirit of watchful enquiry into the nature of the animals and the technique of their preparation for racing rather than the mere enjoyment of celebrity attachment to the sport of kings.

Owen freely admits to the thrill of a having a punt. His business advisors say that this indulgence, shared with a sizeable section of the male population, has cost him in the region of £30,000 to £40,000 over the last two years – a percentage of his earnings, which if reproduced by a plumber or a stevedore of sporting inclination, would not only leave him free from censure but make him something of a hero of working-class culture.

Owen is also taking heavy flak over his card-playing losses during his World Cup incarceration on a stretch of the Korean coastline notable for a huge statute of the Buddha and the rusty workings of a stone-breaking plant.

The point of any kind of gambling is that it does afford some kind of excitement and that the golden rule, which Owen has clearly observed, is that you do not go beyond the stage which signals the danger of obsession and, possibly, addiction. So far Owen has manfully buried any indignation he may feel about the critical dichotomy which labels him a bad role model for young people in a society riddled with pagan values, including the most disgusting celebration of greed. He acknowledges the dangers of gambling, and says that he would never encourage anyone, of any age, to bet.

However, while exercising his personal freedom, he does not apologise for enjoying a wager. His bets tend to be grander than the 10 pence Yankee which can make a harmless day's drama for an old age pensioner, but that should surprise only those who are obliged to count up the psychological factors which shape our lives with the help of the matchsticks they imply Owen should use for his card sessions.

There are, of course, some compelling arguments in favour of a close monitoring of card-playing among team-mates, and no one made them more forcibly than the most famous manager of Owen's Liverpool. In his 1977 autobiography, Bill Shankly reported that as a young and relatively prosperous footballer he made a disastrous return to his Ayrshire mining village of Glenbuck – losing his holiday savings of £60 in a card school of tough and knowing miners.

Shankly, with more than a touch of irony, said the loss – which forced the abandonment of a trip to the Isle of Man – was remarkable in that if he had won all the money in the school it wouldn't have amounted to anything like £60. Shankly was also left penniless in a session at Carlisle, where the trainer Tom Curry, who died in the Manchester United air tragedy, gave him a loan – and warned him against "future donations" to the old pros. Shankly reflected that the cards, while great for alleviating tedium on long trips, could be divisive – and in strict proportion to the amount of money won and lost.

A sense of proportion, however, has not been exactly a feature of the Owen debate, in the course of which another question has been posed: how many times do we have to suffer the doleful countenance of Tony Adams as he pronounces on the devastating messages sent out by individual lapses of some of today's players? Adams, it should be said, is a splendid example of someone who got hold of his life and prolonged a superb professional career. He wrote a revealing – and highly successful – book about his fight against alcohol addiction. Now his presence on the scene can be somewhat less uplifting.

Adams reminds you a bit of the love-lorn Welsh school teacher recalled by the humourist Gwyn Thomas. Unhappy in love, the schoolmaster found an outlet in a war against the evils of tobacco – and this before the first negative report by the surgeon general. "It was terrible," Thomas reported. "You could no sooner strike a match in the lavatory than he would appear out of nowhere like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Adams is in danger of a similar effect.

Owen's reputation would be secure if football was not so blighted by a strange pecking order of critical priorities.

Where is the horror in Owen's conduct when you even begin to compare it with the outrageous gambling with the game's entire future by those who are generally first to criticise the errant behaviour of a young player?

Are Owen's visits to the betting counter to be seriously compared with the irresponsibility of clubs like Leeds United who have hocked their futures on the Doomsday financing of star players who might just produce the winning ticket of regular participation in European football?

Have the commentators who lament the "bad influence" of Owen, and talk about the loss of his '"squeaky-clean" image, made much of a fuss about the fact that such an icon as Sir Bobby Robson was one of a legion of top managers who bought shares in the company of a leading agent, one of those guys who was supposed to have drained away the lifeblood of football?

Should we not be rather more concerned about the appalling reality of conflict of interest, real and potential, at the highest level of football management than the strictly controlled, utterly legal recreational activities of a young footballer who over the last six years has earned himself the weighty baggage of being a model professional?

Football has a whole raft of problems, both moral and practical. Michael Owen, we should say in the name of reason, is not one of them.