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Major football sponsor deals with gambling brands on decline

Major football sponsor deals with gambling brands on decline

Gambling brands are no longer the most prevalent sponsors across major English sporting teams after several companies exited deals with major English football teams over the last two years.

While gaming and casino advertisers are still the most prevalent sponsor across England’s professional football teams, their headline sponsorships have significantly declined. 

Seventeen gaming brands have exited football as the most prevalent sponsor since 2019, but still account for nearly one in six (15%) of all professional teams in England. This is down from 33% in 2019.

Instead, Construction & Engineering, Automotive and Financial Services sectors have all overtaken the Gambling industry as the most prevalent sponsor, according to research by  sponsorship intelligence company Caytoo. 

Caytoo analysed the single main sponsor of 221 teams which revealed that Construction & Engineering firms now account for 11.2% of the sponsors, followed by Automotive (9.4%) and Financial Services (8.5%) firms.

Gambling – which held top spot two years ago – has seen its share across all the sports almost halve from 15.3% to 8.1%. The drop has been driven entirely by football.

The change has been driven by a greater demand from society for professional sports to be more socially responsible, according to Caytoo’s head of research and analysis Alex Burmaster. 

Burmaster said: “A prime example of this change is Norwich City FC. At the beginning of our research the club signed a deal with Asian betting firm BK8 but by the time the research finished Norwich had terminated the deal due to public pressure over the sexualised nature of BK8’s marketing activity and replaced them with Norfolk-based Lotus Cars who recently announced a £2.5bn investment to move to producing only electric vehicles.”

Financial Services is the most dominant in rugby while Automotive and Construction & Engineering lead the way in cricket.

 

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