Face of Entain’s anti-black market campaign heads into consultancy

Simon Zinger, formerly a key figure in Entain’s campaign against unlicensed gambling advertising in football, has revealed his next career step. Entain’s General Counsel has become the latest name in iGaming with considerable experience of regulatory matters to enter the field of consultancy. Zinger hailed the beginning of a “new chapter’ on LinkedIn this morning as he announced his role in setting up two new consultancies, Calibri Law and Bluestar Partners. Zinger is Managing Partner at both firms. Both consultancies are based in London, and have very distinct remits. Calibri Law, as its name suggests, focuses on legal advisory, while Bluestar Partners is a strategic advisory. Zinger shared that Calibri Law will provide legal advice shaped by his own experience of handling legal and compliance needs with operational challenges and business strategies. Bluestar Partners, meanwhile, will provide strategic advice around regulation, risks and opportunities, with a wider remit than that of Calibri. The company’s focal areas will be regulatory support, government relations, crisis management, international business expansion, customer protection, and sports integrity. “After many years working inside globally regulated businesses, I want to now offer two practices grounded in practical judgment, commercial understanding and the realities of operating under regulatory and reputational pressures,” Zinger wrote. Regulatory experience is in-demand It’s hard to argue with Zinger’s assertions that he has a great deal of experience in the areas outlined above. He has been working with Entain, a FTSE 250 and formerly FTSE 100 gambling group, for the past five years, first as Group General Counsel before taking on additional responsibilities as Chief Customer Care Officer. As mentioned above, Zinger became a key figure in Entain’s campaign against unlicensed gambling advertising around football, particularly in the Premier League. This campaign saw the operator reach out to government bodies like the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) and UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), as well as to the Premier League itself, and some of its member clubs. Zinger’s time at Entain has likely added to his experience of crisis management – his five year tenure as General Counsel oversaw the widely publicised £17.2m penalty issued by the Gambling Commission in 2023, at the time the largest ever issued. Entain’s ex-General Counsel’s move into consultancy follows the similar career transitions of Andrew Rhodes and Tim Miller, the respective former Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the Gambling Commission, who have both moved into the same field. Regulatory experience is in high demand in the consultancy space right now, it seems. Zinger’s new consultancies will not just focus entirely on gambling, however – both Calibri Law’s and Bluestar Partners’ websites list target industries as gambling, gaming, media, marketing services and adjacent businesses. Entain is also one of several major past employers of Zinger, as he has also worked as Group General Counsel at Dentsu and Assistant General Counsel at Vivendi, while his legal career started with work as a solicitor for two San Francisco law firms in the 1990s.