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The betting logo that became almost routine on Premier League shirts is disappearing.
The change is striking because gambling companies were not a fringe presence in English football. In the past two seasons alone, 11 of the 20 clubs carried betting or casino branding on the front of their shirts. Now the clubs have agreed to end those arrangements.
Eight teams had to find new principal shirt sponsors this summer.
Not all have managed it.
Nottingham Forest and Sunderland are still without new deals, while Chelsea have again struggled to secure a long-term front-of-shirt partner. The problem points to something bigger than a change in football advertising. Clubs are being forced to rethink what a shirt sponsor is worth, and which industries can realistically replace gambling money.
Gambling money made the gap between clubs wider
The gambling boom followed the Gambling Act of 2005, which gave betting operators far more freedom to advertise. Tottenham helped set the tone in 2006 with a four-year deal with online gaming company Mansion worth £34m.
That figure now looks modest.
When Tottenham agreed an eight-year deal with AIA in 2019, the contract was worth £320m. Manchester United’s Snapdragon agreement is estimated at around £60m a year.
Those numbers explain why gambling companies became particularly attractive to clubs outside the traditional elite. Their advertising budgets could compete for attention even when a club did not have the global reach of Manchester United, Liverpool or Manchester City.
By 2017-18, nine Premier League clubs had gambling companies on their shirts. The figure reached 11 in each of the last two seasons.
The new rules remove a major source of demand.
Kieran Maguire, a football finance professor at the University of Liverpool, has linked the difficulty some clubs are having with the loss of gambling sponsors and a mismatch between what clubs believe their commercial value to be and what companies are prepared to pay.
Chelsea is a notable example. The club wants a long-term agreement that reflects its status after winning the FIFA Club World Cup, but finding a partner willing to meet that valuation has proved difficult. Its short-lived partnership with AI company IFS last season lasted only a few months.
That shift towards technology is already visible elsewhere.
Crystal Palace have moved to Temporal and Fulham to ClickHouse. Four Premier League clubs will have technology companies on their shirts this season, with Ipswich and Manchester United joining them.
Finance is even more prominent. Five of the 17 clubs with confirmed sponsors come from the sector, including Everton’s agreement with CMC Markets.
Insurance, tourism and recruitment are also taking spaces previously occupied by betting firms.
The commercial map of English football is changing.
The shirt itself has become a global advertising platform
That was not always the case.
When shirt sponsorship began in the late 1970s, television companies resisted the idea because they viewed televised logos as free advertising. The Football Association and Football League eventually allowed sponsorship ahead of the 1979-80 season, although restrictions remained for televised matches and cup games.
Everton’s Hafnia deal and Liverpool’s partnership with Hitachi were among the first prominent examples.
By 1983-84, the television restriction had gone. Every top-flight club had a sponsor.
Technology companies dominated the early years. JVC, Panasonic, Pioneer and Sharp were familiar names on English football shirts. In the first Premier League season in 1992-93, nine of the 22 clubs had technology sponsors, five of them Japanese.
There was also a much stronger local connection.
Ten sponsors were based in Britain. Seven were within 100 miles of the club they sponsored, and four were less than 10 miles away. Wimbledon had no shirt sponsor at all.
The modern Premier League is a very different marketplace.
Only four current clubs have UK-based sponsors, and three of those companies are headquartered in London. Ipswich is the exception, with Stowmarket-based Halo located about 12 miles from the club.
For many supporters, the name across the chest may belong to a company they have never heard of, based thousands of miles away.
The money explains why.
Premier League commercial revenue has risen from £58m to £2.4bn in 2024-25, according to figures cited by Maguire. The expansion of the league’s international broadcasting audience has pushed up the value of sponsorship, with front-of-shirt deals becoming one of the most important commercial assets.
The industry itself has changed several times. Alcohol brands were prominent in the 1990s, accounting for roughly a third of sponsorships at one point. Everton’s Chang was the last beer sponsor in the Premier League, disappearing after the 2016-17 season.
Gambling filled much of the space that followed.
Now technology and finance are moving in.
Betting has not disappeared from Premier League clothing
The ban applies to front-of-shirt sponsorship, not every commercial relationship between clubs and gambling companies.
Some betting brands have simply moved elsewhere.
Betano has shifted from Aston Villa’s shirt to its sleeve. Everton has done the same with Stake.com, although crypto casinos could face restrictions of their own at the end of the season.
Bournemouth will have Vitality on the front of the shirt, but gambling branding remains elsewhere. MrQ will appear on the sleeve and SBK on training wear.
Manchester United’s arrangement with Betway shows how valuable those secondary positions can be. Its training-kit deal is reported to be worth up to £20m a year, a sum larger than the main shirt sponsorship available to many smaller Premier League clubs.
For those clubs, training wear is often not sold separately because the commercial value is too limited. The principal sponsor and training sponsor are commonly bundled together.
There are still gambling partnerships inside stadiums, online and across advertising boards. Yet only five Premier League clubs have confirmed gambling logos somewhere on their clothing this season.
The front of the shirt, for now, is being reclaimed by other industries.
And another category is waiting in the wings.
Cryptocurrency companies have begun taking prominent positions. Chelsea has BingX on its sleeve, while Manchester City has an agreement with OKX. The Financial Conduct Authority has already warned football clubs about sponsorship arrangements involving unauthorised financial firms.
The Premier League spent two decades turning betting brands into a normal part of its visual identity.
This season, that identity starts to look different. Whether finance, technology or cryptocurrency becomes the next dominant presence will depend on which industries are willing to pay what football clubs believe their shirts are worth.
Source: www.aol.com
