It is just after daybreak and two dozen yellow T-shirts are making their way across Sheffield, from Bramall Lane in the south of the city to Hillsborough on its northern edge.

There are young and old in the group, which draws encouragement from passing cars, and each has a reason to have begun a 41-mile walk that will end in Leeds the next day.

The thread that links them all is the lasting impact of gambling upon their lives. There are recovering addicts determined to force change and those less fortunate, who continue to wrestle with tragedy and grief.

Like Kay Wadsworth, whose only child Kimberly, consumed by a gambling addiction, took her own life in 2018 at the age of 32. Kay can be found clinging to her daughters doll at the beginning and the eventual end of a walk carried out in her name, an emblem of what she has lost and cannot hope to replace.

The yellow T-shirts worn by Kay and her fellow walkers feel almost as poignant.

On the back of each is 409 the number of lives Public Health England estimated were lost to gambling-related suicides in 2021 in England alone. That amounts to seven per cent of suicides across the whole of the UK.

This is the latest walk organised by The Big Step, a campaign group that wants to rid football of all gambling advertising.

There have been 10 of its kind before, each designed to take the message to the homes of professional clubs.

They have marched across London, between Manchester and Liverpool, and from Edinburgh to Glasgow. In the summer of 2021, the Big Group even walked from Scotland to Wembley in a 300-mile epic that coincided with the start of the European Championship.

This one was Yorkshires. Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday,

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A 41-mile walk with the group that wants to end gambling adverts in football - The Athletic