As Premier League football clubs prepare to phase out gambling brands from the front of match day shirts, campaigners warn that the English game’s deep ties to the betting industry remain entrenched.
In response to pressure from the UK government and campaigners, the Premier League, the highest level of English football, last week moved to distance itself from the industry for the first time.
The league announced that it would end front-of-shirt betting sponsorship from the 2026-27 season in a symbolically important move.
About £60mn of annual revenues are at stake for the eight clubs affected by the ban, which now face the challenge of replacing that income with other sponsorship deals amid an uncertain economic outlook.
But the reluctance of footballing authorities to respond to calls from safer-gambling campaigners to go further by cutting ties with the betting sponsors altogether exposes the degree of financial dependency on the industry, particularly in the lower leagues.
One senior football executive called the move a “political fudge” that makes “no logical sense” because gambling sponsorship continues on shirt sleeves and pitchside advertising hoardings.
“Government felt they had to do something to keep the hawks at bay,” they said.
Andrea Sartori, founder of sports data company Football Benchmark, said the Premier League was trying to “portray an image of social responsibility because gambling excessively is bad for society but . . . they don’t want to give up the revenue that comes in from that industry”.
Football offers the gambling industry an avenue to convince young men, the most committed gamblers and most likely to develop addiction, to channel their interest in the sport through betting.
In the year to March 2022, football ranked as the sport with the highest betting activity in the UK, drawing in £1.1bn in gross gaming revenues for operators, according to the Gambling Commission, the industry’s watchdog.
The Premier League’s global fan base has attracted foreign companies, such as Philippine offshore gambling operators Dafabet and Fun88, which sponsor Bournemouth and Newcastle, respectively, aiming to reach international audiences as well as the domestic UK fan.
It is a bond that goes back to 2002, a decade after the Premier League’s launch, when Fulham became the first English football club to sign a sponsorship deal with gambling platform Betfair.
A University of Stirling study from 2020, which looked at five major football matches including Premier League fixtures, found that a gambling sponsor was referenced every 21 seconds during a typical TV broadcast.
Despite the ban on front-of-shirt sponsorship, the gambling industry remains entrenched in English football at every level. There is no move to adopt the Premier League’s voluntary ban in the lower leagues, several of which are sponsored by SkyBet, which is now owned by Flutter, the world’s biggest betting group.
Clubs in the English Football League, which runs the three divisions below the top flight, have a greater reliance on betting sponsorship money as their media rights income is smaller than that of Premier League clubs. Even some of the worst-performing top-flight clubs can make money from TV rights in excess of £100mn a year.
The EFL has been sponsored by Sky Bet since 2013, with half a dozen of the teams in the SkyBet Championship carrying front-of-shirt betting brands. The EFL and its clubs make roughly £40mn of revenue a year from betting deals.
Peter Shilton, a former England goalkeeper who has campaigned against betting sponsorship in sports after overcoming gambling addiction, said he would like to see the EFL opt not to renew its SkyBet deal when it expires at the end of next season.
“Football’s a great game and it’s a family game but it’s been saturated by gambling companies,” he said. “It’s time to reel it in like it was with smoking [adverts] in Formula 1.”
The EFL declined to comment on the SkyBet deal. The organisation argued that gambling operators should make a financial contribution to clubs because of the significant profit they generate from competitions.
In his 15-year senior football career, Wycombe Wanderers midfielder David Wheeler has never played a match where the ball or his kit has not been adorned with the logo of a betting company.
Gambling sponsors “are everywhere”, said Wheeler. Once the change is implemented “they’ll be almost everywhere, just not on the shirts of a few clubs”. “I have a Man of the Match medal that says SkyBet. It taints it a little,” he added. SkyBet owner Flutter declined to comment.
“At the end of the day, there’s not a queue of other sectors ready to pay the football league money that will trickle down to Accrington Stanley,” said one gambling executive, referring to a small Lancashire club in the EFL. “There’s not the oat latte company that’s ready to step in.”
The EFL has previously cited research it commissioned that found there was “no evidence” that seeing gambling sponsorship is associated with increased betting among fans.
The crackdown on gambling sponsorship in the Premier League comes as crypto and digital asset groups press ahead with new partnerships with football clubs.
Vaughan Lewis, head of investor relations at gambling group 888, training kit sponsors of EFL Championship side Cardiff City, said crypto’s involvement in football was akin to “pure unregulated gambling”.
“Gambling gets all the flak but crypto is also financially risky,” said Alex Burmaster, co-founder of sponsorship intelligence company Caytoo.
“You would assume that the gambling firms will try to make the most of it while they can,” Burmaster said. “They wouldn’t keep spending that money if it didn’t work.”
Additional reporting by Alan Smith and Ella Hollowood in London