Banning Gambling Sponsors In EPL: What Lies Ahead!
The 2026-27 season will be nothing like before for many EPL clubs – at least sponsorship-wise! EPL’s decision to ban gambling advertisements from the front of players’ matchday shirts, is about to bring many changes in clubs’ revenue streams and will possibly lead some of them to encounter financial limitations, as they will be forced to find new lucrative and generous sponsorship deals by the end of 2025.
The questionable ethics behind having bookmakers and online betting companies -the best of which are offering sports betting at allbets.tv– sponsoring the sporting events, upon which they build a big part of their revenues is coming to an end. Or at least it is ending as we know it today. There will be no more EPL clubs with gambling brands on the shirts of footballers as front-of-shirt sponsorship has been banned. Although not effected immediately, the ban will take full shape and form as of the 2026-27 season.
Whether this is a right or wrong decision, is something that we will see in the long run. Following the likes of La Liga, EPL decided that gambling sponsorship is a bad thing for the league’s image, plus it contradicts the ethical values of the whole organization.
Betting-related brands on clubs’ matchday appearances expose audiences -a huge part of which is underaged individuals and small children – to gambling and normalize it to an extent that it may affect people’s subsequent behaviour.
Within the greater framework of reducing gambling advertising – as a means to reduce gambling addiction or problem gambling activities – banning gambling brands from the front of the shirts that some of the most aspired footballers wear, becomes a one-way road for the greatest and most popular sports league in the entire world.
So, although ethically and morally, EPL’s decision to voluntarily withdraw from gambling sponsorship seems to be the most suitable move, in practice how this is going to work, remains to be seen. That’s because the gambling sponsorship ban is not as straightforward or as explicit as one may think. In fact, things are much more complicated and much more vague.
For one thing, banning concerns only the front-of-shirt ads, which means that sleeves are up for grabs and gambling brands can work their way through the audiences via this part of the footballers’ shirt! Though not quite the same as having the betting logo appear on the front, the sleeve remains a viable and possibly very effective spot to place the advertisement. So, we might not see online casino or sportsbook brands – for info you can read more here- on the front of players’ shirts, but we may see them on their sleeves or on advertising banners surrounding the field! And while this appears to be somehow ironic, given that these spots also work well in communicating the brand and so why bother ripping it out of the shirts, it also perplexes things.
Besides this ‘tic tac toe’ game, it is also a matter of revenue for the EPL clubs. Practically, in other words, the gambling sponsorship ban means that EPL clubs – or better, the eight EPL clubs that are currently under sponsorship deals with big betting sites – will need to search for new big spenders, willing to invest huge amounts to have their brands advertised on the front-of-shirt space in footballers’ appearance. But this is not easy, given that gambling was the one sector that demonstrated an impressive willingness to pour a lot of money into communications and marketing campaigns.
What will the future be is yet not known. Whether banning gambling sponsors will eventually generate greater interest from other sectors and industries or it will just make gambling brands more innovative and creative in finding their way to EPL’s audiences, is something that we are all going to see sooner or later. Just as we are all going to see whether EPL clubs will be able to find equivalent revenue streams or they’ll have to manage exposed financial limitations in the absence of big sponsorship deals.
