Betway’s Man Utd £20M Deal Changes the Game for UK Gambling Sponsors

At the end of May, it was confirmed that talks held between Premier League football club Manchester United and UK bookie Betway had resulted in a £20 million annual sponsorship. Betway is set to become United’s training kit sponsor, in the most expensive deal for just a training kit. They couldn’t get the front of the main United kits, as from the 2026/27 season onwards, no Premier League team will be allowed to don a gambling sponsor on that valuable advertising space. Manchester United already have microprocessors developers Snapdragon (developed by Qualcomm Technologies) on the front of their main kit.

But their training kits will now feature Betway, a gambling brand that has long featured on the front of the West Ham shirt. This comes at a time when gambling sponsors in the Premier League have come under fire too, though not British based operators like Betway. Rather the offshore bookies, or betting sites that are white labeled in the UK, but primarily target punters in Africa, Asia or the Americas. Manchester United’s new gambling sponsor is completely legal and won’t upset any of the regulatory parties, but for some it represents a step backwards in an industry that is otherwise cleaning up its act.

Manchester United Betway Sponsorship

Training kit sponsors are really secondary to the front of shirt, main football team sponsor. If you were a company looking to sponsor a Premier League team, there are multiple ways to go about it, but the main sponsors target:

• Front of shirt sponsors: typically worth anywhere from £5m up to £60m+
• Sleeve sponsors: Usually around 10-30% of main shirt deal, about £1m to £4m
• Training Kit sponsor: More than the sleeve sponsors, can be £2m up to £5m

But now, Premier League clubs will no longer make front of shirt deals with gambling sponsors, as the league announced a few years ago they would voluntarily ban these partnerships.

Manchester United was partnered with the crypto exchange firm Tezos, which provided around £25 million per year. But now they have brokered a deal with Betway, in a £20 million per year sponsorship. The Betway brand will now feature on Manchester United training kits. This is quite a surprise for two reasons.

One, that gambling sponsors seem to be on the way out, as the UKGC makes it increasingly more difficult for operators to use sports to advertise their products, and that front of shirt sponsors have now been voluntarily banned by the Premier League. The second is that the deal is quite lucrative, and contradicts theories made earlier in the year when analysts predicted that the departure of Premier League front of shirt sponsors would make sports sponsorship deals less valuable for the entire market. Betway has proved otherwise, in what is one of the biggest deals for a training kit sponsorship.

UK Bookies Against Offshore Betting Sites

The thing going for Betway here is that they are a local British brand. Sure, Betway also holds a gambling license in Malta, and the main operations are right now handled in Empire Stadium Street, Gzira, in (guess where) the island of Malta. They still hold a UK gambling license with the UKGC and serve British players. It is actually becoming a more done thing, to base operations outside of the UK and maintain the minimum allowed presence in the UK to retain the license and continue operation. Just last year, Sky Bet relocated to Malta, while announcing it would still serve UK customers, only restructure its operation to cut costs ahead of the UK gambling tax hikes.

Insiders are not really against the local brands here, but the using of Premier League clubs to promote offshore bookies. Ones that don’t even face UK customers but are aimed at Premier League fans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Such is the massive worldwide appeal of the Premier League, that an Asian facing bookmaker could broker a deal with a mid table club, and get enough exposure to dominate the local market they are aiming at. Without a worry about who in the UK gets exposed to the advertising, nor whether or not they are actually marketing sports betting products in a market that doesn’t legally recognise them.

Entain called this practise out, sending a letter to the UKGC and Chief of the Premier League demanding they look into the bylaws of UK gambling ads. Entain wrote that the UKGC should restrict unregulated bookies from gambling sponsorships. These platforms are not legally recognised nor licensed in the UK, and have been accused of using white-label solutions to exploit a loophole and sponsor Premier League teams. There has been no public follow up to Entain’s calls at the time of writing.

Other Premier League Gambling Sponsors

As front of shirt gambling sponsors are phased out, the gambling operators will look to other places to shift their budgets. Teams that have had longstanding gambling sponsors like Aston Villa, Everton, Leeds, and Bournemouth were predicted to lose around £80 million in sponsorship deals from this shift. But that may not necessarily be the case now. For while they don’t have the pull of Manchester United, the Betway training kit sponsorship will serve as a good alternative way to secure those lucrative gambling sponsorships.

Tottenham Hotspur has featured BetMGM on their training gear for years now, and this will encourage the clubs who are losing front of shirt sponsors to look for alternatives. The training kits and sleeves are not the only areas that Premier League clubs can offer to these gambling sponsors.

There is strong marketing value in LED pitchside advertising, stadium naming rights (although most clubs have moved away from this), and providing the digital marketing rights to gambling sponsors. The latter can be extremely lucrative, as clubs can form regional betting partnerships in Asia, Africa and Latin America, besides official betting partner rights in the UK.

Gambling Sponsors in Other Countries

The Premier League is arguably one of the most globally followed football league in the world. This attracts gambling sponsors from all over, including the many offshore sites that don’t actually operate in the UK – the issue that is bringing up the ire among Entain and UK registered bookies. The UK has one of the tightest gambling markets in Europe, with increasingly strict player protection protocols and operator compliance requirements. But while the regulator has even set up an Illegal Gambling Taskforce with the intent of fighting the black market, there are still wide loopholes in the system.

Compare it to Spain, where gambling sponsorship of sports teams has been heavily restricted in recent years. Front of shirt visibility is now very heavily limited, so gambling operators tend to act as secondary or auxiliary sponsors to main La Liga clubs. The Italian Serie A is in a slightly different predicament. It released the Dignity Decree in 2018 that forbade teams from using gambling sponsors, but that ruling has now been called up for review, allowing gambling sponsors to return but with strict conditions.

One of the most tightly regulated markets for gambling sponsorships is Germany’s Bundesliga. The gambling sponsorship is pretty much limited to just official betting partner statuses, but not because it is explicitly forbidden by law. No, it is also cultural in Germany, as most clubs avoid gambling sponsors because of their club principles, reputation policies and because it is just not as much of a done thing there as it is in Italy, Spain or the UK.

Key Takeaways of United’s Betway Sponsorship

There is a palpable shift from gambling sponsors across Europe, as their exposure and influence causes concern to gambling regulators, who are looking at curbing the advertising of sports betting. Whether it is through targeting third party advertising space like illegal live streams, or making restrictions on gambling sponsors using sports figures or celebrities to boost their appeal, regulators are tightening the window for gambling firms.

Yet this move by Manchester United and Betway has raised attention to a, not altogether new, but potentially concerning loophole for gambling firms. Training kits may not receive as much attention as the main home and away shirts, but Betway has invested heavily in this sponsorship. Which could perhaps raise hope for clubs that are now out of gambling sponsors after front of shirts are off limits. While they most likely won’t get a figure nearly as high as the £20 million Manchester United will reel in from the deal, if they could bargain for £5 – £10 million, it will already soften the blow.

The fight against unregulated bookies sponsoring Premier League club is still being waged by UK bookies, but this new development may prompt the UKGC to look at gambling sponsors in their entirety, and rethink this historical relationship between bookies and clubs.