Half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs have sponsorship or advertising deals with gambling companies that are not licensed in the UK — up from six clubs over the summer, according to analysis reported by the Guardian. Those deals could be illegal next year under proposals the government is developing. An eight-week consultation on banning sponsorship from unlicensed operators closes on Wednesday, with licensed bookmakers such as Ladbrokes and William Hill on one side and the Premier League on the other.
The rise from six to ten clubs is the predictable result of the league’s own voluntary ban on front-of-shirt gambling sponsors, which took effect this season. The inventory did not disappear; it moved. Everton announced a three-year sleeve sponsorship with the crypto casino Stake.com, which is based in Australia and Curaçao. Fulham moved its SBOTOP sponsorship from the players’ shirts to the training kit. Eight other clubs, including Chelsea and Tottenham, hold deals covering stadium perimeter advertising, player branding, or both. One operator licensed in Curaçao, 8XBet, has agreements with Chelsea, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Ipswich and Coventry.
What the league is arguing
The Premier League is understood to be lobbying against the ban on the grounds that the services offered by primarily Asia-facing betting companies and online casinos are not available in the UK. As the Guardian notes, that argument holds only if nobody uses a VPN: anyone can open an account and place a bet in minutes. The gambling minister, Vicky Foxcroft, is understood to have told operators the government intends to introduce the ban next year, and the league will push to let existing contracts run their course.
The gap matters because of what unlicensed operators are not required to do. Firms regulated in the UK must offer affordability checks, deposit and spending limits, and Gamstop self-exclusion. Operators licensed offshore owe their customers none of that. Unregulated betting has grown quickly in Britain: unlicensed companies earned £379m from UK users in the first half of 2025, per the Campaign for Fairer Gambling — 9% of the country’s £8.2bn online gaming market, up from 2% in 2022. The growth of that market has been linked to financial harm, addiction and suicide.
Sponsorship as an acquisition channel
The mechanism the government is targeting is awareness. A Frontier Economics study cited in its own consultation found that club sponsorship deals are the second-largest driver of consumer awareness of unlicensed operators, behind only social media advertising. There is a related loop that should worry the league more than the consultation does: Campaign for Fairer Gambling research found that 89% of illegal streams in the UK carried adverts for black-market bookmakers, and unlicensed operators are a principal source of funding for sports piracy. The league’s £12bn television rights deals are the asset being eroded by the same black market it is defending as a revenue stream for its clubs.
Read the letter with its author in mind
The letter at the centre of the pressure campaign came from Entain, which owns Ladbrokes, and it went to all ten clubs linked to unlicensed operators. “The risk to football, sport integrity and society is real,” it states, noting that unlicensed operators are not required to offer Gamstop, spending limits or affordability checks: “This removes the protections most likely to prevent consumer harm, meaning vulnerable customers unfairly pay the price for the partnerships that their clubs make.” The letter to Everton points out that the prime minister, Andy Burnham, is a fan of the club and attended its opening match — “It seems unimaginable that … Andy Burnham would become a billboard for unregulated gaming by wearing the club’s current strip.”
Every factual claim in that letter is consistent with the government’s own consultation. Entain is also a direct competitor of the operators it wants clubs to drop, and the outcome it is lobbying for happens to protect a licensed market it holds a stake in. Both things can be true; neither cancels the other. The government’s clampdown is a defence of the regulated market as much as it is a consumer-protection measure, and the clubs are treating the sponsorship money the way most clubs treat revenue they cannot easily replace.
The story is British, but the structure is not. Sponsorship buys awareness for operators that sit outside the regime imposing affordability checks, and the audience pays in the currency those protections were written for. The same question — whether a bet placed through a legally distinct channel still lands on a person who cannot afford it — is what the fight over event contracts in the United States is turning on.