Online bookmakers’ sponsorships of top flight football clubs

While the issue of problem gambling is gaining more and more the attention of experts, specialists and psychology professionals, ringing the bell to punters who exhibit such a behaviour, we see a whole other picture in the industry of sports betting, with major, top flight English clubs featuring bookmakers’ logos on their players’ uniforms – promoting in that manner, sports betting in the UK. Isn’t this a kind of dividing, ironic and contradictory thing? On the one hand, we have betting and gambling hitting all time high records and in that respect, alarming punters to be careful with their engagement and problem gambling and on the other hand, we have bookmakers and online sportsbooks sponsoring teams of the ‘crème de la crème’ leagues of the football world.

Betting companies’ sponsorships

In the season 2021-22, 45% of the clubs in the Premier League – that is nine out of the total of twenty teams – had a logo of a bookmaker on the shirts of their footballers. And we are talking about the absolutely famous, all-time popular and high profile league, which has the top English clubs competing against each other for the ultimate trophy and which has one of the strongest and higher viewership rates in the entire, global football market. At the same time, this is also happening in other leagues to an even greater extent! In Brazil’s Serie A nineteen out of twenty clubs are sponsored by betting companies, making a total of 95% of the top division’s teams featuring a bookmaker logo on their uniform.

In other parts of the world, like Spain, bookmakers’ sponsorships to football clubs has been prohibited or restricted by regulatory acts, following allegations that sponsorships generate greater betting engagement and in turn this might lead to far more intense problem gambling. This typically comes from key recent stats illustrating that sponsorships and advertisements of sportsbooks increase fans’ adherence to sports betting. On the other hand, the Gambling Commission issued a report stating that there is no causal relationship between exposure to bookmakers’ brands and further development of problem gambling, noting that in the period 2020-21 problem gambling rates fell despite the exponential growth of betting companies’ advertisements.

Achieving greater reach

Bookmakers, especially online sportsbooks, are interested in sponsoring clubs in high profile leagues because of the reach that they offer. In fact, bookies can achieve far greater reach when they have their logos appearing at the front of teams’ football players shirts in extremely popular football competitions and events, than when they spend millions on billboards and ads. For example, the Premier League games are watched by an unexpectedly high number of people: it is those who attend live matches, those who watch a televised, broadcasted game and besides these, it is also those who watch highlights and key match moments on social media and social networking platforms. All these add up to countless opportunities for online bookies to reach audiences and address to target groups.

Bookmakers’ benefits: Brand associations

Traditional offline advertising or even online advertising can’t really offer the breadth and depth in target market reach that the bookmaker logo featured football shirts offer. And this is not only by counting the number of viewers exposed, but also the associations made in the minds of the football fans.

Brand associations are so strong, positive and ever so powerful when the target audience makes both implicit and explicit links between their favorite club and the brand, which is a bookmaker’s brand in that case. Just imagine that the brand is connected in the mind of the football lover (and of course the team fan) to feelings of excitement, fun, pleasure, pride and satisfaction, especially when the team is having a remarkable win or when the club is performing at very high levels. Or when brands are linked to matches that are giving football fans unique moments of spectatorship pleasure.

There is no doubt that bookmakers are gaining enormous benefits from sponsoring football clubs and having their logos appearing on the uniform of footballers of the world’s most iconic and high profile clubs. But what’s in it for the clubs themselves? Besides receiving money and financial support by the sponsors, clubs are further strengthening their fans’ loyalty and engagement with the sport itself! And certainly this is one thing that they are definitely interested in!