FootBiz newsletter #188: Football Sponsorship After the Betting Ban

FOOTBIZ

Friday, August 21, 2026  ·  FootBiz

The betting ban didn't kill the relationship

For several years, the coming ban on gambling companies appearing on the front of Premier League shirts has been presented as a fairly simple commercial problem.Clubs would lose betting sponsors. Betting companies would lose Premier League exposure. Somebody else would buy the inventory.Brentford have provided a useful reminder that football commercial relationships rarely work quite so neatly.The club has extended its relationship with Hollywoodbets for another five years, taking a partnership that began during Brentford's Championship promotion season into a seventh year and beyond.Hollywoodbets won't be on the front of Brentford's Premier League shirt anymore. Under the new agreement it becomes the club's official betting partner, with the relationship moving further towards supporter experiences, matchday activation and community work.

Which is interesting.Because the Premier League's voluntary ban has removed one particularly valuable piece of inventory.It hasn't removed betting companies from football.For clubs that have spent years building relationships with gambling brands, the commercial question has therefore become less "who replaces them?" and more "what else can we sell them?"Sleeves. Training wear. Digital inventory. Hospitality. International rights. Content. Matchday activation. Official betting partnerships.Football clubs are quite good at inventing things for sponsors to sponsor.And Brentford's deal suggests some betting companies still see plenty of value in the Premier League without having their name emblazoned across eleven players' chests every Saturday.The front-of-shirt ban may ultimately change the architecture of betting sponsorship more than the amount of betting money flowing into English football.

Brentford in their Hollywoodbets-sponsored kit at Old Trafford in 2022—the front-of-shirt relationship now moving into a different commercial form.

Photo: Ardfern · CC BY-SA 4.0 · unmodified

Meanwhile, Burnley had a rather different week

At Burnley, the front of the shirt has been considerably more eventful.The club has terminated its agreement with trading platform Finotive One just 42 days after announcing it.That's barely enough time for the shirts to arrive from the factory.Finotive had been announced as Burnley's principal partner in July. By last week, the relationship was over.Burnley then promoted existing commercial partner Vertu into the front-of-shirt position for 2026/27.There was, inevitably, a practical complication.Supporters had already bought shirts with Finotive's logo on them.Burnley consequently offered affected fans a choice of refund, exchange or complimentary rebranding.

There is a broader commercial point here beyond one sponsorship going wrong.Football's largest pieces of sponsorship inventory are increasingly valuable — and increasingly visible. That makes due diligence on counterparties particularly important.A sponsor isn't simply a cheque.Its brand sits on your players, in your stadium, across your social media and, in this instance, on merchandise supporters have already paid to own.When the relationship breaks, the club inherits part of the problem.Vertu, meanwhile, offers Burnley something valuable that perhaps doesn't attract quite the same headline:an existing relationship that already works.Sometimes the boring sponsor is the good sponsor.

Google wants more than the advertising boards

Google has expanded its partnerships with Arsenal and Liverpool, bringing Gemini into both relationships alongside Google Pixel.This is worth watching because it reflects a subtle change in what some of the world's biggest technology companies want from football.The old sponsorship model was relatively straightforward.Brand gives club money.Club gives brand exposure.Everyone poses with a shirt.Google's approach increasingly looks more integrated.Gemini becomes an official AI partner, Pixel retains its smartphone role and the products themselves are intended to become part of how supporters interact with the clubs.

And Google isn't stopping there.Its relationship with Bayern Munich is also being expanded, with Google reportedly paying more than €10m annually as a Platinum Partner and Gemini becoming Bayern's official Consumer AI Partner.The attraction isn't difficult to understand.Football provides enormous audiences, extraordinarily high levels of emotional engagement and — crucially — repeated opportunities for product usage.A beer company can put its logo beside the pitch.A technology company can potentially put its product inside the fan experience itself.Content creation. Search. Match information. Photography. Personalization. Commerce.The sponsorship can therefore become a product-distribution strategy.That's rather more interesting than another LED board.

Arsenal and Liverpool before a Champions League match—the two English clubs through which Google is extending Pixel and Gemini deeper into the supporter experience.

Photo: Wonker Wonker · CC BY-SA 2.0 · unmodified

Dijon have put the season ticket in the scarf

One of the best ideas of the week comes from France.Dijon FCO have introduced scarves incorporating technology allowing them to function as season-ticket credentials and cashless payment devices.Yes, the scarf.At first glance this sounds like somebody in a sponsorship meeting got carried away.But there is actually a clever idea underneath it.The traditional football season ticket is fundamentally administrative.The scarf is emotional.One gets you through the turnstile. The other tells everybody who you support.Dijon have combined them.Supporters can therefore wear something that simultaneously acts as merchandise, club identification, stadium access and a payment mechanism.

It is a small example of something clubs should probably be thinking about much more seriously:Why are ticketing, payments, loyalty and merchandise still treated as separate products?The scarf itself may or may not become commonplace.The underlying idea probably will.

Salford have hired Accenture to help build the club

This one is potentially much more significant than the size of the club suggests.Salford City have entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with Accenture designed to use technology, data and AI across the organization.Not sponsor the training kit.Not put its logo on the dugout.Help redesign how the football club operates.The stated objective is to create a technology-driven growth model spanning internal operations, supporter experience, commercial growth and international reach across both the men's and women's teams.

This is interesting precisely because Salford aren't Manchester United.Large clubs can throw considerable money at technology, employ enormous data teams and commission different consultants for different problems.Lower-league clubs can't.If Accenture and Salford can build systems that allow a relatively small organization to automate functions, understand supporters better and operate with fewer people, the model potentially becomes applicable to hundreds of clubs.AI in football is currently surrounded by a great deal of nonsense.But one of its genuinely interesting applications may simply be allowing small football clubs to behave like bigger organizations without acquiring bigger organizations' payrolls.That's worth following.

Salford City players and staff at Plough Lane—the comparatively small organization Accenture will use to test a technology-driven operating model.

Photo: Timmy96 · CC0 · unmodified

An academy sale worth watching

Real Salt Lake have transferred 18-year-old academy graduate Zavier Gozo to Crystal Palace.The fee hasn't been disclosed, but RSL describe it as a club-record transfer and have retained a significant percentage of any future fee.The player is interesting.The business model is more interesting.Gozo progressed through the RSL Academy, Real Monarchs and then the first team before being sold directly into the Premier League.Academy → second team → first team → Europe.That is almost exactly what an MLS development pathway is supposed to look like.

And increasingly, European clubs aren't waiting until young American players are fully established.They're buying earlier.For MLS clubs outside the league's biggest commercial markets, this offers another route towards economic sustainability.Produce.Play.Sell.Retain the sell-on.Repeat.RSL now have something else of value too: evidence.The next talented teenager considering whether to join their academy can be shown an actual pathway from Utah to the Premier League.That makes successful player trading both an exit strategy and a recruitment tool.

THE COMMERCIAL BOARD

Bayern × Miele

Bayern Munich and Miele have extended their partnership through 2029, taking what is already a six-year relationship into another cycle.The interesting part is the expansion.The partnership is moving further into hospitality, digital content and experiences built around cooking and food rather than simply providing conventional sponsor visibility.There is a lesson here that increasingly appears across mature football sponsorships.Renewal doesn't necessarily mean buying more logos.It means finding more ways in which the sponsor's actual business can intersect with the football club's audience.Miele sells premium kitchen appliances.Bayern has premium hospitality, enormous reach and supporters interested in experiences around the club.You can see the logic.

Forest find finance

Nottingham Forest have signed Marex as their new principal partner.The global financial-services company will appear on the front of the men's, women's and netball shirts under a multi-year agreement announced this week.It's another example of the changing Premier League shirt-sponsorship landscape.Betting brands aren't simply being replaced by one obvious category.Financial services, technology, automotive and other businesses are all testing whether the Premier League's extraordinary international reach justifies the price.For Marex, which has been expanding internationally, Forest effectively becomes a very large moving billboard for a company that most football supporters have probably never previously heard of.Which, from Marex's perspective, is rather the point.

Someone finally aggregated American youth soccer

This could become a very good business.SOCCER.COM has launched a national sponsorship platform that packages together more than 1,500 youth soccer clubs and 34,000 teams across the United States.Instead of a brand negotiating independently with dozens — or hundreds — of local organizations, it can effectively buy access to a national youth-soccer audience through one relationship.The platform also incorporates SOCCER.COM's retail operation, content and an audience of more than seven million social-media followers.It's such an obvious idea that you wonder why it hasn't been industrialized before.American youth soccer is enormous.But commercially, it is extraordinarily fragmented.Thousands of clubs.Millions of players and parents.

Lots of local sponsorship.Very little aggregated national inventory.SOCCER.COM is effectively trying to turn fragmentation into a media network.And the audience is particularly attractive.Football-playing children generally come attached to football-spending parents.Kits. Boots. Travel. Hotels. Food. Cars. Insurance. Financial services. Technology.There are an awful lot of categories that would like to talk to those households.The interesting question is whether SOCCER.COM can turn a collection of local relationships into something that national advertisers genuinely value.If it can, the inventory could be considerable.

A NUMBER WORTH KNOWING

194.5 million.That's the cumulative social-media reach Al Wahda say they generated during 2025/26.The Abu Dhabi club has renewed and expanded its relationship with UAE-headquartered fintech group Equiti, which will now take front-of-shirt inventory alongside property developer Lead Development.Al Wahda also report a total broadcast audience of 70.1 million across 760 hours of television coverage last season.

Why include this?Because the commercial geography of football continues to broaden.For years, discussions about sponsorship value outside Europe's biggest leagues were often based on fairly vague promises of "regional exposure."Clubs are becoming considerably more sophisticated about quantifying what that exposure actually means.Reach doesn't automatically equal value.But being able to demonstrate who is watching, where they're watching and how frequently they're engaging makes the commercial conversation rather easier.Especially when the potential sponsor is itself trying to grow internationally.

ONE MORE THING

There is an interesting little pricing experiment happening in Dallas.New USL club Atlético Dallas and women's side Dallas Trinity FC are deliberately positioning affordability as part of their product.Both will play at the Cotton Bowl, and the organizations say they are working with Fair Park and stadium partners to control not merely ticket prices but the total cost of attending a match — parking, concessions and fees included.That sounds obvious.It isn't.Sports organizations generally obsess over ticket yield while supporters experience matchday cost as one number.A $25 ticket isn't really a $25 ticket if parking costs $30, two beers cost $28 and feeding the children requires a small refinancing.Atlético Dallas is effectively betting that affordability can itself become a competitive advantage.

In a city containing the Cowboys, Mavericks, Stars, Rangers and FC Dallas, that's probably sensible.Not every football club needs to maximize revenue per supporter.Sometimes the better strategy is maximizing the number of supporters who can afford to become habitual customers.Because the most valuable ticket isn't necessarily the expensive one you sell once.It's the reasonably priced one you sell twenty times.

The Cotton Bowl at night—the shared venue where Atlético Dallas and Dallas Trinity FC are testing affordability as part of the product.

Photo: Loadmaster · CC BY-SA 3.0 · unmodified

FootBiz

The business behind the game.