We’ve come to realise that the advertising bods at Paddy Power love to cause a bit of controversy. With ads such as the notorious Oscar Pistorius number and bad taste tweets from employees, their strategy for brand awareness seems to be the classic ‘get as much press as possible by pissing off as many people as possible’ technique.

With that in mind, their new lorry certainly doesn’t disappoint. With photos of prominent non-English sports stars such as Andy Murray and Mo Farah and the caption “Immigrants, jump in the back! (But only if you’re good at sport)” emblazoned on the side, the offending vehicle has been cruising the English and French ports, which for years have been struggling with the flow of illegal migrants from Calais into the UK, usually in the back of lorries.

As the Sun notes, whilst some people are appalled, others find it a stroke of tongue-in-cheek genius. Kirsty O’Connor tweeted:

Will you marry me? I think our love of inappropriateness would be a match made in sporting heaven”.

To be fair to them, it’s no secret that there is a dearth of home-grown sporting talent in the UK. As this nifty infographic from the Telegraph shows, the Premier League is woefully lacking in that department.

So while the subject of illegal immigration is certainly not something to make light of, you could say that Paddy Power have actually made a clever double entendre on the state of the sporting landscape and on border control.

[sources: The Sun and The Telegraph]