A massive 50% of Premier League clubs are connected to Bookmakers!

The Premier League is the strongest football league in the world! Liverpool are the Champions! Even though the fight for the title (not officially, but...) was over even before the quarantine began, the league itself ended only last week. English football was represented by four teams out of the top eight in the Champions Leagues last season and the all-English finals of both major European club competitions make it fairly obvious to anyone that the English Premier League is the dominant League in the world of football.

The stronger the competition, the higher the level of the players and the quality of the game, and this is what brings such a huge interest from spectators and football fans. According to Hookit data (July this year), in terms of the number of followers and the level of connection with the audience, four Premier League clubs are in top ten sports teams in the world (That’s ALL Sports). Sponsors are attracted by the spectators and fans, who are in turn attracted by the product itself: High-quality, entertaining football. Throughout the season I followed the English Premier League matches and "my professional eye" automatically began to pay attention to the betting sponsors, it was noticeable how sports betting has established itself over the years, as the main industry supporting English football.

In recent years, the amount of offline betting has been decreasing both naturally and through consolidation of large players in the local market. Logically the internet has allowed the majority of sports betting to move online. I was interested to see how many local operators are using football clubs to promote their brands because it occurred to me that maybe such advertisement works more for foreign markets?

The statistics of general sponsorship in the past season is startling. Betting has taken the center stage on the shirts of exactly half of the Premier League's 20 clubs. For comparison, the following three industries have only two teams:

• Financial - “Liverpool” (Standard Chartered), “Brighton” (American Express);

• Airlines - “Man City” (Etihad), “Arsenal” (Emirates);

• Cars - "Man United" (Chevrolet), "Chelsea" (Yokohama).

At the same time, none of the top five football clubs at the end of the season has a betting company as the main sponsor. If you look at the table below, almost all the clubs with a major bookmaker sponsorship remain at the bottom of the league table. The highest position is for the “Wolves”, who finished in the seventh position and gained a spot in the Europa League, next season.

Sponsorship is not always limited to just being the main shirt sponsor. You can be the sponsor of second or third level features as well. Also, specifically for betting companies, a subcategory of “Official betting partner” was created, which, in order to maximize income, sometimes is also divided by region. For example, you can become the official betting partner of “Tottenham” in Africa or Latin America.

Some interesting facts:

- None of the five largest UK betting operators* are represented as general sponsors, and four out of five are not represented at the club level at all. Bet365 is the only declared as one of the five (!!!) sponsors of “Leicester”.

- Yes, Leicester City F.C. has five sponsors from the same industry.

- Six clubs have logos on their uniforms duplicated with hieroglyphs: “Bournemouth”, “Burnley”, “Crystal Palace”, “Wolverhampton”, “Newcastle”, “Watford”. The goal is obvious - to communicate with the Asian market.

- Three brands with “Magic Eights” in their logo speak about the emphasis towards the Asian market: “Aston Villa”, “Newcastle” and “Bournemouth”.

- The UK market is not the main market for any of the general betting sponsors (except for Betway, but it seems that in recent years they have been growing at the expense of other markets). Almost all betting operators that have become general sponsors target markets outside the UK - like Asia, India (Dafabet), Africa (Sport Pesa) or Latin America (Sportsbet.io).

- After the litigation around the partnership between W88 and “Wolverhampton” a few years ago, foreign operators are now trying to get a British license for the brand advertisement, in order to avoid legal problems.

- ManBetX has two general sponsorships at once - “Wolverhampton” and “Crystal Palace”, plus their sister company has a sponsorship contract with “Arsenal”.

The logical conclusion: The Premier League has established itself not only as a top-tier league but also as a global brand. The British culture of betting and society's attitude towards this type of entertainment allows it to expand the list of betting partners and conduct interesting campaigns towards this market.

* Top 5 British betting leaders:

Ladbrokes Coral - 30,000 employees; annual income (2019) - $3.2 billion;

William Hill - 16,000 employees; annual income (2019) - $2.2 billion;

Paddy Power - 8,000 employees; annual income (2019) - $2.3 billion;

Bet365 - 3,500 employees; annual income (2019) - $3 billion;

Sky - no data.