iGaming Daily

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A frantic week of gambling developments saw the FA, Premier League, EFL and Women's Super League agree to a new code of conduct for gambling sponsorships. To be enforced from the upcoming start of the new football season, the code is based on competitions, leagues and clubs applying the four pillars of protection, social responsibility, reinvestment and integrity in relation to their gambling sponsorships. FA and league bosses believe that the Code will uphold all regulatory objectives set by the gambling review in how gambling and betting is promoted to the football audiences. However, are the Code's measures sufficient to quash the growing calls from reformists on the government to intervene on gambling sponsorships, taking away control from football authorities? I'm Martin Elliott and welcome to today's edition of iGaming Daily, brought to you in partnership with Optimu. the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. As a special offer, Optomove is offering new clients a free first month. For more information and to claim the free first month, please go to optomove.com forward slash SBC. Now, joining me today to discuss the ever controversial issue of football sponsorships are Ted Menmue, SBC's content director, Ted Orme Clay editor of insider sports and payment expert How you doing today Ted down there in London fantastic hottest day of the summer or the year and Keeping myself fresh with a Cold latte so well Martin Things can't get better. I could have sworn you were going to say lager when you started with the cold lager. Yeah. And, Ted, what about you? Because it's also sweltering up here in Manchester to the point where in the first time we live in memory we haven't had to have the heating on in the office. Yeah, it's made quite an interesting change really from pouring rain and arctic wind and so on. Yeah, it's been manageable though, I think. Not been too bad. Yeah. It'll never catch on up here this warm weather idea though. No, no, no. It's for the south I think. People will be far too resistant to it I think. Yeah. People weren't even happy about HS2 and the trains coming up here, let alone Spanish style weather. Outrageous. Anyway, I'd just like to start before we get into the discussion with a little survey of your consumer behaviour. So... Ted, as Mr. SBC News, I'm going to come to you for the first part of this. Have you ever had a bet with any of the following operators? I'm going to take a deep breath before I get into this list. Bitano, BJ88, Hollywood Bet, Net88, Steak.com, SBOTOP, BC.game, K&Sports, Rollbit, Betway or DeBet? The two of them. The two of them. Impressive. And part two of your question as well, have you ever bought a ticket for the Plus Minus Equals Divide multiplication tour, which I believe is something to do with the musical stylings of Ed Sheeran? Come again? That is Ipswich Town's sponsorship. I'm pretty sure a young person would tell me I pronounced that completely incorrectly with all those symbols in it. So Ted. Ted, as editor of Inside a Sport, I have a related but separate set of questions for you. Have you ever had any convincing done by Watson Ramsbottom solicitors? I can't say I have no, Martin, although there's still time for me to find a reason to employ their services, I guess. Absolutely. Had any product fulfillment done by Huboo? I have not, no. I can't actually begin to tell you what Derby sponsored do, so I can't ask a question about that. Have you ever bought any threads from Blakely Clothing? No, but I'm always on the lookout for a fresh look, you know. So maybe I'll do some perusing of their site later. Yeah. Any packaging from Bangkok Glass? No. There's a whole list of these. What about Dry Rot Fix by Classic Builders maybe? When I finally get myself on the housing market, I'll give those guys a shout. Okay. taking a degree at University of Portsmouth? There's always a chance to expand my skills. Yeah. And have you bought a PVC door curtain from Par Group? I think I'll refer back to my question about the property market. Okay. And once again, have you, I don't know what this company do, but ever done something with guavas with my guava? I don't even think I've ever eaten guava, you know. No. You know, like maybe add like a kind of fizzy drink that's guava flavour to something. Do Rio still do? Is it Rio? Or Rubicon? I think who do guava. Okay. I'm not familiar with the product. But anyway, the point of this is just to illustrate the kind of importance of betting sponsorships within English football. So the first list for Ted with all the gambling operators is Premier League. And everything that I asked you about, Ted here, or the others, are championship sponsors. And that really illustrates part of the difficulty that clubs have in gaining really high-level, lucrative sponsorship contracts. And there's still that reliance on the gambling industry. So this is actually a fairly core issue. we're going to be discussing today, both for the gambling industry, but also particularly for football clubs in England as well. So, Todd, to come to you, this sort of resolution of gambling sponsorships in English football is long overdue, isn't it? It's been the subject of much discussion over the past few years. How did we get to the position we're at today with this code of conduct? I really don't want to redact two years of the whole debate and what's been put through the parliament. But if we can just revert back to when the Gammon Review's white paper was published in April, 2023 last year. And if we recall on the marketing segment of the Gammon Review, the actual... paper related to marketing and sponsorship was kept quite vague. And what the government and especially DCMS required, it said that it would allow sports bodies and sports leagues that have a connection with gambling or have quite a big exposure to gambling to form their own code of conduct. related to gambling sponsorships. In the end, the Code of Conducts must respect current CAP laws and must be working the framework of the gambling review to be implemented. And they wanted it to uphold integrity, social responsibility, but most importantly, to protect underage and vulnerable audiences. This is kind of English football's unified response. to that mandate of the gambling review. Sure. And Ted, looking at some of the practical things, which you cover quite a lot on insider sports, I guess one thing which the football industry did reasonably well to deflect this is that gambling sponsorships are coming off the front of Premier League shirts in two years' time, something like that. There'll be a sort of self-imposed embargo on those not embargo, self-imposed restriction on those coming in at that point. So are there any other sort of implications that come from either the gambling review or from this code itself that sort of apply to that will drive the practicalities of how sponsorships can be used in English football? I think the first one to address is obviously, as you mentioned, the fact that these betting partnerships are going to be relegated from the front of shirt, if you want to use a football related sort of half pun. And will from 2026 to 2027, from the end of the 2026-27 season, sorry, they're just going to be on sleeve, on shirt sleeves and around like perimeter advertising and things like that. I think one of the things that the code, the way the code relates to this is there's going to be a requirement that the perimeter advertising in question is not shown within sort of viewership of within range I guess is a term of use of family stands and things like that. This is all part of a overarching debate. We've had quite a quite hotly contested topic about the potential impact gambling sponsorships might be having on younger audiences. Obviously football is a multi-generational activity, you've got people from all age groups attending including ones who aren't old enough to bet. So I think that's been one of the main concerns of a lot of reform advocates and that's kind of been replicated in this code that's come out of the review. Some other things to do with the code of conduct, overall in terms of practicality obviously its purpose is to govern how these partnerships are conducted. as the name suggests. Some of this is going to, I think some of the caveats are around areas like where money is spent. Obviously sponsorship revenue from betting partnerships is huge. That's why so many of them engage with these partnerships as you listed out some new examples earlier. I think one of the code of conduct areas is I want to see proof that the revenue is being redirected into the sport and yeah, into its development and things like that. And just coming back to you Ted, do you think there's a chance that the implementation of the code will be effective and do you think it'll hold across all levels of football, including you know, we always focus on men's professional football when we're talking in England, but there's also youth football, there's also you know, a huge growth in women's football as well, all of which need revenue to support them. That's the million dollar question. And I think year one is going to be critical of that assessment and how we, whether we actually, I think the key kind of benchmark is going to be that exposure to gambling brands at a match day basis across all levels of English football and from the kind of MPs responses and stakeholder engagement. That is the area that they want to see. They want to see a kind of the minimizing of. matched a visibility of gambling brands with football audiences. Can you apply a code of conduct across four professional leagues? And I'd actually say to this that the English football will be the first professional league in Europe to apply such code upon its game. And It's a huge undertaking to take. There will be infringements of the code. There will be headlines of where clubs and leagues will fail in applying this. So I think it's going to be quite a rollercoaster journey this next season in how functional the code is. family stand is interesting as well, because that makes the obvious place, you know, within view of the family stand is interesting. Because that makes the obvious place to put your gambling advertising boards is in front of the family stand where you can't see them when you're sitting in that stand. Which is then effectively you have, when the TV camera pans across, the gambling brand with a load of children sitting behind it, which is also a bad luck, I think. We're just going to take a short ad break now and then we'll be back very shortly to discuss some early fallout from which has come just days after the code was published. And now welcome back to part two of today's iGaming Daily where we're discussing the changes in football sponsorship regulation. Now Ted, you've covered this or actually one of your colleagues Kieran has covered this in quite some detail. There's been, well... a little bit of fallout regarding the Code of Conduct and a high-profile sponsorship deal already. Yeah, I mean the Code of Conduct, even from its initial announcement in the Gambler and Agri-Review White Paper last year, has always had a bit of an icy reception from some aspects of this debate, obviously as you'd expect from the reform advocates and the campaigners in particular. It had been quite a vocal objective of a lot of gambling reform advocates for quite a while that they wanted to see a... sort of a complete ban on sports sponsorship activities, particularly in football, but I think a lot of them wanted to see it go further than that. Obviously the argument that a lot of sports authorities had to counter this was that the revenue is really important, particularly to the lower leagues of English football and to rugby league for example and other sports. So there was initial fallout to the code from that a lot. I think the white paper, a lot of advocates felt that it didn't go far enough in really addressing the relationship between betting and sports that exists in British society. But yeah, a more recent example of fallout in relation to this code, kind of in the context of it coming in. As you said, my colleague Kieran on Inside of Sport wrote a good article about this. The UK gambling commission, I think it was late last week, advised Nottingham Forest and Crystal Palace about their relationship with K-UN Sports, which is one of the operators you listed in the introduction earlier. K-UN, I believe, are no longer licensed in the UK due to their white label agreement with an Isle of Man based company expiring. This then goes against... Not just that, I think obviously this goes against the provision of the code which is the UK football, no English, sorry, football clubs because obviously this doesn't apply to the Scottish league. English football clubs shouldn't be engaging in relationships with companies that aren't licensed in the UK. I think this is already quite a long-running principle governing English football sponsorships anyway. But it's really been doubled down on in this code. So yeah, there's that element to... discuss really the regulatory side of it. On top of that a lot of these Premier League agreements we've been seeing lately with some of the operators you discussed have had a bit of a negative backlash from fans on social media, particularly around a lot of these companies that are based overseas and don't really have much brand recognition in the UK as opposed to let's say you know Bearways partnership with West Ham is quite, is a bit more highly regarded I think. in comparison to these? Sure, sure. I mean, I think that is a bugbear for supporters in particular is that, you know, the brand across the front of the shirt, it's not necessarily they're rejecting it to it being gambling. A lot of it is gambling from an unknown company that's not really – that doesn't really have a presence in the local community or do, you know, or do anything much in the local community that is positive. So that's an interesting thing to keep an eye on, I think, whether there is a further fallout for Forrest and whether they can still keep that sponsorship deal running or not. But getting back to this, there's another thing we saw this week, which was the, well, you just mentioned them actually, Betway, they've signed a deal with Manchester City. which is very different from their traditional sponsorship deals. So what can you tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, as you said, yeah, as you said, Martin, it's very different to their other sponsorship deal. We'll talk about the flagship one with West Ham. That's a very traditional, all-encompassing sort of agreement. They have their logo on perimeter advertising and most notably on the front of the West Ham shirts. This will have given them quite a lot of... exposure lately given that West Ham have had a bit more visibility with some better on-pitch performances in recent years. The Manchester City deal is very different to that in that there isn't any shirt sponsorship encompassed in the deal. Obviously Manchester City already have quite a prominent partnership with Etihad anyway which is both their front of shirt partner and their stadium naming rights partner. The Betway deal is just going to focus predominantly on in-stadium advertising, I think, as well as I'd imagine some sort of like social media and digital presence. So I think that's really falling in line with both the upcoming front of shirt sponsorship ban as well as the code of conduct that's come into place. I think that's kind of an example of Betway really getting with the times and thinking about how they can approach these partnerships in more of a... a modern way I guess you could say in the context of the recent regulatory developments and changes with the Premier League's own self-governance around these partnerships. I think that's going to be, I think this is going to be something that's going to become quite defining moving forward. Sure, sure. So one sort of follow-up question we talked about the front of shirt ban coming in. Are Premier League clubs still going to be able to sign those sort of training kit deals? where you then see the player and his training kit on Instagram every day during the week and on the sub bench and so on at the weekend? I think they are, yeah. I think the main aspect of the ban is just going to be match day kits. The training wear kit we'll still be able to. I mean we've already seen that lately haven't we? Bet MGM have partnered with Tottenham Hotspur in one of these sort of deals. Like you say this is actually quite a significant one because there's on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and so on. TikTok now increasingly as well. You're always gonna see videos and clips and pictures from training sessions where this branding will be featured on it. So that's quite a significant part of modern football's digital presence, I guess. It'll be interesting to see if that ends up getting addressed in a couple of years time in a sort of regulatory sense. If it might get, it could end up getting raised within the context of the. these long running debates we're seeing around betting sponsorship and marketing. And Ted, coming back to you, there's a lot in the code about social responsibility and also part of that is reinvestment in football. Is there any detail in the code about how that is actually going to be implemented? How is that going to be monitored and how we're going to make sure clubs are actually... living up to their commitments. Okay. So from the start of next season, clubs can have to file in with the leagues and the UK Gamma Commission, their performance reports or their updates on the Gamma sponsorships, what social initiatives have been initiated. Also the coverage of coverage and visibility of the brand within the match day, where the brand has been promoted. So there's going to be a much closer inspection of how the sponsorships are undertaken. Also, as Ted detailed, there has to be a filing of the monetary filing on the reinvestment made by that sponsorship towards the club and its community. So again, lots of kind of prominent stuff coming in from the code on integrity and social responsibility. I think this is going to two tiers of gambling sponsorship, either those that do it correctly and apply kind of new provisions to their sponsorships and really kind of move away from just from sponsorship just being a promotion to you know, more focused on kind of the social impact of the sponsorship with the club and with this community. versus just the people that just tried to get some presence in English football? Sure. I mean, I think you can already see the different reactions between those two approaches. You don't really hear anyone complaining about Skybet sponsoring the whole Football League and they do. Part of their agreement with the Football League is they reinvest a load of money in local communities and every club in the Football League has a sort of Community Trust, which Skybet donate a lot of money to and so on. So that's all quite well received. And having supported a club that had one of these sort of Asian betting operates on the front of the shirt for a long time, I can tell you that was really unpopular with supporters who viewed it as just being completely alien to the values of the club and the values of the supporter base. So it's... If we push a bit more in that direction of the sky better, then I think that'll be a good thing overall, both for football and for supporters and for the gambling industry itself. So just to finish off now, asking you to get your crystal ball out, as I usually do at the end of these things. Do you think the implementation of this code will quell the demand of gambling reform campaigners that English football has to? end its relationship with gambling? I'll go first, I'll say no. I mean, there's certainly going to be some people who might think it's gone far enough, but as I said earlier, when the white paper itself was published, there were quite a few voices across this debate. People have been quite vocal on this topic for quite a while, both in public and political circles, who didn't feel it had gone far enough and were quite openly disappointed with it. I don't really see that debate ending anytime soon. Okay, I think I've got a more kind of positive view. I think that the code can take the debate on gambling sponsorships to a better platform. I think that can be done if it has that kind of transparency from DCMS and the leagues and the gambling commission where they're saying, look, the people that are doing it right are reinvesting and it's visible in communities and the grassroots. elements of the sport. You can never you can never fight against the headlines. There will be kind of infringement to the code. There will be bad sponsorships there. Those are the ones that need to be kind of kicked out or phased out of football. And then this is also the code is kind of inbound with the Premier League of phasing out front of shirt sponsorships by 2026. I I think that the UK and the gambling review can lead other jurisdictions in other areas in Europe where they're dealing with these matters in how to apply for sports sponsorship. And if it does that, it's a very, very big achievement. I think that gambling can form a part of sports, but it has to be conducted in a much higher much better manner and it has to have kind of a social impact. And I think that's what leadership actually wants at the end of the day and it can get there. It just needs kind of better boundaries to be formed. Mason Higgins Sure. I'm absolutely with you, Ted. I think this is an overwhelmingly positive development and you might see some casualties along the way, but I think we'll be, you know, in a couple of years time, we'll look back on this as a... really important step towards both an actual healthier relationship between gambling and professional support and also a better public image for that relationship as well. So interesting times. But anyway, Ted and Ted, thank you very much for joining me today and thanks for listening and we'll be back again tomorrow with another edition of iGaming Daily.