The timing could not have been worse.

No sooner had AFL football operations chief Adrian Anderson announced the substantial penalties to Heath Shaw and Nick Maxwell last Friday for betting on matches - and delivered a sermon about the evils of gambling - than the radio station which carried his media conference cut straight to an ad for football betting.

Nothing could have better illustrated the tangled web the AFL now finds itself: taking bookmakers' money with one hand and using the other to admonish players who punt with the very same bookies.

Anderson had just delivered a stern, solemn press conference, announcing that the AFL had been plunged into what many have described as a betting scandal. Here was the AFL's right-hand man, declaring that the league's handling of the potentially volatile industry that is sports betting, is "central to the integrity of the competition."

Anderson closed his conference, by maintaining "it is fundamentally important" that the AFL controls betting to uphold its "integrity."

The badly timed appearance of the ad seriously undermined his message, and perfectly illustrated the conundrum now facing the AFL. They accept in excess of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from their partnership with commercial bookmakers, which naturally involves the promotion of football betting, yet jump up and down with indignation when one of their players or officials is caught having a $10 punt on a game.

As we all know, sports betting is now as much a part of the footy-going or footy-watching experience as the game itself. It is now practically impossible to avoid the promotion of a bookmaking agency during a match.

Betfair and TAB Sportsbet, two of the industry's largest firms, directly sponsor the AFL itself.

The league's three primary radio broadcast partners - Triple M, SEN and 3AW - have ties with major sports betting companies. The same goes for its TV broadcast partners in Channel 7, Channel 10 and Foxtel. In the AFL heartland of Melbourne, betting agencies sponsor the two primary stadiums - the MCG and Etihad Stadium.

Amazingly, of all 17 AFL clubs, only the Gold Coast Suns and Sydney Swans do not have any connection in place with a betting agency.

The league can't be blamed for accepting the increased sponsorship revenue provided by the continued emergence of wealthy gambling conglomerates in the sporting landscape.

But the AFL should, and needs to, know the potential consequences of opening their sport to this sort of industry.

This does not at all excuse Shaw, Maxwell or any other player from becoming involved in sports betting. Athletes' betting on sport can lead, as we've seen in cricket, to ‘match fixing' and that's a disease the sporting world should take every possible step to try and stamp it out.

Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, warned that betting is as much of a danger to sport as performance-enhancing  drug use, describing it as "potentially crippling" and a "cancer."

Whilst Rogge was employing more than a little hyperbole, his point - which is similar to that presented by Adrian Anderson - is valid. Some of the most controversial and heinous crimes committed against sport have been as a result of gambling. NBA referee Tim Donaghy notoriously was found guilty of betting on matches he officiated, Shane Warne and Mark Waugh were embroiled in a mountain of controversy for their admittedly minor role in a match-fixing scandal on the sub-continent. And perhaps the worst of all is the now infamous Chicago "Black Sox" incident when the team intentionally lost the 1919 World Series.

But as much as Anderson will cite the potential dangers lurking in the shadows around the edges of the sports gambling world, he also knows one clear-cut truth. Sports betting conglomerates contribute millions of dollars to the AFL alone, and are a vital cog in the revenue flow of the league. It would be naïve and, to paraphrase Anderson, potentially damaging for the AFL to ignore the massive sums of money on offer.

But as long as the league continues to accept a king's ransom of cash from these agencies, then they should not be getting too high and mighty in chastising players for being involved in sports betting.