Shirts are now the best sign of the game’s global reach
Gambling is booming and bookies have found a way to get the message to the whole world
The opening weekend of the first Premier League season, in August 1992, was a parochial affair. Only 13 footballers from outside the British Isles played, and there were no foreign managers or owners at all.
Even the logos on team shirts had a homespun feel: the Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (who sponsored the Norfolk club), Draper Tools, a family-run hand-tools company near Southampton. Wimbledon did not even have a shirt sponsor.
Fast forward to 2018, and the landscape has changed beyond recognition. The value of Premier League shirt sponsorship has mushroomed to more than £300million, while it is not just the front of kits that are of interest to sponsors: as of last year, sleeves could be bought too.
The expanding market is a reflection of the league’s increasingly global appeal. In 1992-93, with only 60 matches televised a year in the United Kingdom, and fewer than two million subscribers to Sky Sports, much shirt sponsorship was still focused on advertising to those in the grounds themselves. There was commercial sense for a Nottingham brewer – Shipstone’s – putting their name on the shirts of Nottingham Forest.
Now, there are 168 Premier League games televised live in the UK each season and, more importantly, the Premier League is shown in 212 countries and territories. Outside the UK, with no restrictions on watching 3pm kick-offs on a Saturday, it is possible for fans to watch any game they wish. Sponsors are more likely to be targeting an Asian television audience than an East Midlands drinker.
The changing nature of shirt sponsorship is not only an emblem of the league’s transformation into a global behemoth – it also provides a window into broader shifts in the economy in the UK and far beyond.
The onset of the Premier League also coincided with the electronics boom – something that, by facilitating the unprecedented amounts that broadcasting companies could now pay for live football rights, had contributed to the Premier League’s inception. In 1992-93, eight of the shirt sponsors were electronics companies.
It was the first bubble to be recorded on Premier League shirts. Within two years, Commodore International, which sponsored Chelsea, had gone bust; Tulip Computers, which sponsored Crystal Palace, later did the same.
Other booms would be glimpsed on Premier League shirts. By 2002-03, there were six telecoms and media companies; three – including the Chinese company Kejian, which was instrumental in Everton signing two Chinese players – have since gone bust.
Perhaps the most poignant came in 2004, when Newcastle signed a sponsorship deal with a flourishing locally-based bank, Northern Rock. Three years later, the sight of huge queues waiting to withdraw their money from the bank’s branches was one of the first indications of the financial crisis. In 200809, Newcastle, still sporting the Northern Rock logo, were relegated, while the bank edged closer to insolvency. Premier League shirts do not merely betray economic trends, but also geopolitical ones, and the rise of the Middle East is reflected in the Gulf ’s two biggest airlines – Emirates and Etihad – both sponsoring leading clubs in Arsenal and Manchester City.
Yet the biggest recent shift has been the ascent of gambling companies. In 2002, Betfair became the first to sponsor a Premier League team when it signed a deal with Fulham. Bookmakers on shirts have since become ever-more ubiquitous: nine of the 20 clubs are now sponsored by gambling companies.
Technology has abetted this rise. The surge in online in-play betting, which now accounts for the majority of all gambling, has made football and betting “intertwined,” says David Forrest, a sports gambling expert. And for bookmakers who want people to use them to bet on the game, there
A recent study found that gambling logos were on screen 30 per cent of the time
is nothing better than being part of the game. A recent study found that gambling logos or branding appeared 241 times and were on screen 30 per cent of the time during an average episode of Match of the Day.
Bookmakers have been emboldened to spend more on sponsorship because they are one of the few industries enjoying boom times: British punters now lose £14billion a year to gambling companies.
And now, after the ban on fixed-odds betting of more than £2 which will be enacted from 2020, bookmakers will become even more dependent upon sport for making money – and so be even more inclined to sponsor teams.
The uptick in bookmakers sponsoring Premier League shirts has come as gambling addiction is worsening in the UK. There are 430,000 problem gamblers, up from 280,000 in 2012. The charity Gambleaware is conducting a study of whether the vast sponsorship of clubs by bookmakers has exacerbated addiction. Marc Etches, the chief executive of Gambleaware, advocates clubs showing “more commitment to promoting safer gambling to their players and fans in the stadium and those watching at home”.
While the Football Association bans youth teams from wearing anything associated with gambling, sponsoring shirts is effectively a way that bookmakers can circumvent the normal ban on advertising to children.
“We are very concerned that the extent of gambling-related advertising and sponsorship around sport is playing a significant part in normalising gambling for children,” Etches warns. Each week, 370,000 young people aged between 11 and 16 gamble with their own money.
Yet gambling sponsorship is not just about capturing the domestic market.
Everton are sponsored by Sportpesa – which is based in Nairobi and has a small share of the UK marketplace, but is dominant in several African countries.
Africa is the fastest-growing continent in sports betting – and the Premier League’s global cachet renders it an extraordinarily effective way of reaching new customers.
It looms as a harbinger of how, in the future, foreign companies will use shirt sponsorship of Premier League teams to reach a domestic audience, with no regard for the UK market.
Crystal Palace’s sponsor this season is Dongqiudi, a Chinese football app. Another glimpse of the future is Wolves’s sleeve sponsor: Coindeal, a cryptocurrency exchange platform company.
The history of shirt sponsorship in the Premier League has always been a microcosm of wider trends. As the globalisation of Premier League continues apace so, more than ever, shirt sponsorship has come to reflect the world around it.