From beer to betting – how have football shirt sponsors changed?

There were times when the shirts of the top English football teams featured household names, but those days are long gone.

More and more well-known than ever, and many of the companies that now sponsor shirts don’t even try to sell anything to fans.

The combined value of shirt sponsorship deals between Premier League clubs and gambling companies, according to GlobalData figures, is $135.43 million (£101.1) for the 2024-2020 season.

When the Premier League was its foundation three decades ago, none of its 22 clubs had a shirt sponsorship agreement with a gambling company.

The majority of the businesses that sponsored teams for the 1992-1993 campaign sold physical goods in Britain, compared to the majority of those who sponsored teams.

One of the front-of-shirt sponsor companies with headquarters in the UK is currently aiming to sell physical goods that fans can purchase directly. Even Standard Chartered, the partner bank of Liverpool, does not permit customers from the UK to open a current account there.

Technology, construction, and clothing are all now almost entirely absent from shirts.

Seven Premier League shirt sponsors had factories whose headquarters were 100 miles away from their club during the inaugural season. Four of those were based within ten miles, and two, Ipswich and Sheffield United, were closer than ten miles away.

Liverpool is the only club that is currently located within 1,000 miles of the main headquarters of the shirt sponsor.

Big business and wider influence are increasingly what sponsor companies are aiming for, as opposed to the cash flow from the fans in the stands, as have technological advancements and globalization and technological advancements also played a role in changing the dynamic of contemporary sponsorships.

Dr. Joe Piggin, a senior lecturer in sports management and policy at the University of Loughborough, states that “there are around 70 million people in the UK, but there are billions of people all over the world.” Therefore, the companies are provided with economic incentives.

Companies in nations with strong economies in the early 1990s that have since weakened, such as Japan, have become less popular as shirt sponsors as the world has changed.

Meanwhile, sponsorship deals are being made in more recent financial hotspots like the Middle East.

Sponsor companies gain a lot more from working with clubs than just advertising: they can host clients in private boxes, shoot photos with famous players for corporate photos, and occasionally use relationships for political leverage.

Although Uefa announced its first official gambling sponsor last summer, the Premier League itself does not have a formal gambling partner.

Gambling companies are also the most frequently sponsored players at top division clubs in Belgium, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Russia, according to Uefa’s European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report.

The top sectors for shirt sponsorships in Europe’s top divisions are:

With six clubs including Burnley, Middlesbrough, QPR, Stoke, Sunderland, and Watford, gambling is also the most widely used category of shirt sponsor in the Championship.

In League One and League Two shirts, there are no gambling sponsors. Energy, automotive, and food and beverage are the three main industries in those divisions.

According to Matt Zarb-Cousin, co-founder of Gamban, software that aims to help users quit online gambling, “gambling advertising has become almost inextricably linked to football and the industry makes a concerted effort to target young men, which is the profile most likely to develop problems with gambling.”

A generation is developing up in a culture that associates watching football with betting, believing it to be a necessary component of playing sport.

Between April 2022 and March 2023, gambling companies generated a revenue of £15.1 billion, according to the most recent figures from the UK Gambling Commission. With that income, they have plenty of money to spend on advertising. Some people think they will expand their advertising into other areas, such as pitchside hoardings and perhaps even shirt sleeves, even with the looming front-of-shirt ban.

Piggin claims that the front-of-shirt sponsorship withdrawal is symbolic. The significance of that transition beyond public relations is questioned by me.

None of the top six Premier League clubs’ front shirts feature a gambling company: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur.

Gambling companies can target clubs in the lower leagues without spending large sums of money on top-end projects because they face a much higher chance of relegation and the potential economic insecurity that comes with doing so.

“It is less expensive than sponsoring any of the top six,” says Piggin. Additionally, they are recognized on shirts when these teams play in the top six anyway. So why would it be said that “look, we’re in the Premier League, who cares who we’re sponsoring?” “

Some of the gambling sponsors have locations in tax havens like Curacao and Malta, allowing them to retain more of their customers’ profits.

Some of the gambling establishments that appear on the front of shirts are impossible for UK customers to wager on.

Even though gambling is prohibited there, many of those businesses have their headquarters in East Asia and are aimed at customers there.

According to Dr. Raffaello Rossi, a marketing lecturer at the University of Bristol, “There are ways around China’s gambling ban using VPNs and so on.” The Chinese government is in charge of all of their advertising, but they only do so in the UK. Because the Premier League is a global phenomenon, they are still reaching the Chinese population.

However, the fact that British gamblers can’t use some of these companies doesn’t necessarily mean the advertisement has no impact on the audience.