For years, betting brands had one of the most powerful marketing platforms in football. Buy the front of a shirt, get their logo in front of millions of football fans every weekend and let the game do a lot of the heavy lifting. However, that era is now over. From the 2026-27 season, Premier League clubs can no longer carry gambling sponsors on the front of their matchday shirts.
It is a pretty significant change. Last season, 11 of the 20 Premier League clubs still had gambling companies as their main shirt sponsor. The season before that, those deals were estimated to be worth an eye-watering $135m collectively. So, nobody is going to pretend losing that space doesn’t hurt. I’m just not sure it hurts the marketing quite as much as people assume.
A lot of expensive wallpaper
A logo on a Premier League shirt is incredibly visible – that’s a fact. But whether anybody actually thinks about it is up for discussion. Fans can watch the same team every weekend, own the shirt and see a betting company’s name hundreds of times without forming much of an opinion about the brand behind it. At some point, familiarity becomes wallpaper.
The obvious response to the ban is for betting brands to find somewhere else to put the money, be it the sleeve, LED perimeter boards or another partnership asset that delivers roughly the same number of eyeballs. There will be plenty of that as betting brands aren’t being removed from football altogether.
Some betting brands are already adapting smartly, using assets like training kits to maintain a major presence around clubs without relying on the matchday shirt. But that still leaves a bigger question. The shirt did such a good job of guaranteeing visibility that these brands never really had to ask: what are we actually giving the fan?
Stop renting attention
Look at what actually catches football fans’ attention and things get more interesting. Research from Dizplai conducted during this summer’s World Cup found that 40.4% of UK football fans consumed independent creator content or sports podcasts around England’s opening game, rising to 57.6% among under-35s. Nearly half were also watching across multiple screens.
You don’t have to look very hard to see where this is heading. Some betting brands are already showing what ownership can look like. Betway’s Settle It and Coral’s Call Yourself a Fan are good examples because the brand owns the format rather than simply appearing around somebody else’s audience. That gives them something they can build, develop and bring fans back to.
Creators are an obvious opportunity for betting brands, although sticking a logo behind someone and getting them to read out the weekend odds is hardly progress. Football doesn’t exactly struggle for conversation. A half-decent transfer rumour can derail an afternoon, and a forgettable 0-0 draw can somehow sustain several days of analysis afterward. Fans will always keep finding reasons to talk about the game, even when the players have had their ice baths and popped on the coach home. Betting brands should be finding better ways to become part of that.
The average fan’s interest in football is already borderline unhealthy. So, for the love of God, please use it. There’s a better opportunity in making something fans actually want to spend time with. Betting already has a natural place in the way people predict, argue and compete around football. The creative job is to build around that behaviour in a way that feels worth engaging with, even before people choose to engage with it. That requires more thought than buying a rectangle on a shirt.
Make the money work harder
The loss of front-of-shirt sponsorship might actually expose a bad habit in sports marketing: treating access to an audience as if it is the same thing as earning their attention. Betting brands have spent serious money putting themselves into football. That won’t stop. There are too many fans, too many commercial opportunities and too much natural overlap between the category and the sport.
What changes now is the job facing marketers. If you can’t rely on millions of people seeing your name on a shirt every weekend, where are those millions of eyeballs going to come from instead? They are already there. The challenge is working out how to earn a meaningful place in the spaces where football fans are spending their time. Which betting brand is going to lead the football conversation on Substack? Which one is going to work out how to be genuinely useful or entertaining on Reddit rather than barging into it with an ad?
Those questions are harder than buying a sponsorship asset, but they are also much more interesting. They force brands to think about what they can own, what people might come back to and where they have a right to show up in the first place. Otherwise, we’ll spend the next few seasons watching betting brands desperately search for new places to stick the logo that just came off the shirt. And that would be a very expensive way to learn nothing.
Eddie Gold is founder and CEO of The Gold Studios Group, a London- and New York-based agency operating where sport, comedy, culture and commerce meet. With a background in advertising, Gold founded The Gold Studios to create entertainment audiences actively choose to engage with, using it to drive both brand growth and acquisition.
The post Opinion: The logo is off the shirts, yet betting brands aren’t off the pitch first appeared on EGR Intel.
Eddie Gold, CEO and founder of The Gold Studios, says operators should find better ways to become part of the football conversation rather than desperately searching for new places to stick the logo
The post Opinion: The logo is off the shirts, yet betting brands aren’t off the pitch first appeared on EGR Intel.