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Gambling advertising within football has created an “absolute tidal wave of normalisation” for young people “without any understanding of the risks involved”, peers have heard.

James Grimes, from Gambling with Lives, told the Lords Liaison Committee that gambling advertising and sponsorship in football is a “really priority issue because of how many young people just love our national sport”.

Mr Grimes told the committee, which is following up on the 2020 Lords Select Committee report on the social and economic impact of the gambling industry, that “things have got a lot worse since this report”.

He said: “There are many more adverts on many more different platforms and what that’s caused is this absolute tidal wave of normalisation where young people associate gambling as being completely safe, harmless fun without any understanding of the risks involved.”

He added: “A study from the World Cup, which is very timely as England are playing tonight, showed that those watching ITV compared to the BBC – and ITV has gambling adverts – there was 16-24% higher gambling frequency.

“In summary, gambling advertising works.”

The 2020 report warned the liberalisation of gambling by the Gambling Act 2005, the universal adoption of smart phones, and the exploitation of soft-touch regulation by gambling operators had created a “perfect storm of addictive 24/7 gambling”.

It said it expected the Government and the regulator to “make changes now”, adding: “Many of the report’s recommendations do not need legislation, and all of them are urgent if consumers are to be protected and lives saved.”

On Wednesday, Raffaello Rossi from the University of Bristol Business School told the follow-up committee that the gambling industry now spent around £2 billion on advertising each year, saying: “What has changed since 2020 is they have created this very integral and complicated ecosystem of advertising across digital, across sports, media, everywhere, and it makes it very pervasive and hard – well, almost impossible – to escape for both children and adults.”

He said the gambling industry is now mostly investing in digital marketing – on social media, integrated in gaming, loot boxes, streaming platforms, “everywhere online, it is very hard to escape”.

He referred to a newly-published study that found 20,000 paid-for gambling ads had been viewed two billion times in the UK over one year, with around 60% breaching the Betting and Gaming Council code to prevent the targeting of people under 25.

Mr Rossi said the content of ads had changed, saying: “It is much more sneaky, it is much more covert… The problem is our research, which included over 400 children and young people, found it’s four times more appealing to children than to adults, and children as well as young people don’t quite understand that what they are looking at is actually gambling advertising.

“These three things have changed fundamentally – it’s more digital, it’s a higher volume, and the formats have changed.

“As a result of that, the regulations are really, really struggling to keep up with that. We are still relying on self-regulation and that hasn’t worked. We need to create more digitally-focused regulations.”

Will Prochaska, the director of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads, told the committee he is concerned about the convergence of artificial intelligence and ad technology “and what we’re going to see that do in terms of ultra-targeting of people who are particularly susceptible to unaffordable losses on gambling platforms”.

He said: “Truth be told, people in the third sector like myself, as well as the regulators, are typically quite a long way behind the gambling sector, and I suspect this is already being deployed very intensively already and I think it’s something the Government needs to get ahead of.

“The public health argument is clear. If you allow liberal gambling advertising you end up in Britain with an estimated 1.4 million people at any given time who are experiencing problem gambling, families ruined, high streets ravaged, children who are addicted – this is undoubtedly a public health crisis.

“If you reduce gambling advertising and you reduce gambling consumption, you will start to rein that in and you will start to see a reduction in harm.”