Changing trends in sponsorship for Chelsea FC and other clubs

Football clubs rely on sponsorships to function, but the way that sponsors are represented is not always the same. As football has grown to such a huge game, the nature of the sponsorships that clubs take is very different to the early days of the sport. New types of sponsors, such as a casino without Swedish license, are becoming more common across football clubs. 

If you know anything much at all about the way that big international football clubs function, you know that they derive a lot of income from the sponsorship deals that they sign. Companies pay tens of millions of dollars to have their logos and designs included on the jerseys of footballers, particularly when the team is doing well and likely to take those logos to World Cups and league championships. This type of advertising has been common for many decades, but there are new trends shaping the future of club sponsorships. Casino and betting platforms, such as casino without spelpaus, as they say in Sweden, are becoming more prominent sponsors of football clubs.

But how did we get here? What path has the humble sponsorship taken, what path is it likely to take in the future, and how do we feel about the changing nature of football club sponsorships?

How Have Sponsorships Evolved?

If we look back at the earlier days of club shirt sponsorship in the late 1970s and early 80s, the idea is pretty simple. We sell a portion of space on our jerseys to you, where we will display your logo. We perform well in the league, and every time they show our players, people will see your logo. We perform well enough, and they will associate your brand and products with our success. Simple enough. As it began, most of the sponsorships were local or regional, with companies that were based in the nation or even the city where the club was from often being the primary shirt sponsor.

In England in the 1980s and 90s, as sponsorships really became popular, most of the sponsorship companies were electronics and consumer goods retailers, with a healthy dose of airlines thrown in for good measure. The very first sponsorship that an English club signed was Coventry City with Talbot, an automobile company, in 1978. Chelsea FC’s first sponsorship was some years later, in 1983, with Gulf Air. The trend of automobile, consumer tech production companies and airlines signing as sponsors continued for decades, but of the three types, online airlines remain a common shirt sponsor for clubs.

As the popularity of football, especially in leagues like the Premier League, became a more global phenomenon, the nature of sponsorships changed slightly. It became less important for sponsors to be geographically relevant for a team, and instead, global brands were more willing to throw money at teams to boost their visibility. Brands like Samsung and Emirates are the sponsors that people know from the early 2000s, with millions spent per year to lock down clubs to a specific brand.

Of course, football sponsorship has changed again more recently, with the early 2020s seeing another type of industry position itself as one of the key sponsors of football clubs. Online gambling. With both betting and casino without Swedish license platforms paying 10s of millions per year to have their branding on big football teams’ jerseys. While we could spend plenty of time analyzing why certain brands and types of companies have fallen out of regular football sponsorship, let’s instead look at why online casino without Swedish license are becoming more common as sponsors.

Why Do Betting and Casino Platforms Love to Sponsor Football Clubs?

So why are betting and casino platforms so happy to be sponsoring football clubs? There are a few standout reasons that make this a marriage made in heaven for the gambling platforms, such as:

• Sports and betting go hand in hand: Considering that you can’t really have betting without the sports, it’s a bit of a no-brainer to try and cut out as much of the middleman as possible and advertise the betting directly from the sports pitch. For many fans of sports, placing bets is part of the whole experience of watching a game, so seeing betting companies advertised during games is, if anything, helpful.
• A huge global audience: Football remains the world’s most popular sport, and as women’s leagues grow in popularity, it seems poised to get yet more popular in the future. This makes it a perfect avenue for an online casino without Swedish license to advertise in. The gambling industry is also an industry on the rise in global popularity, and as Anders Larsson of CUSL states, “the casino industry is changing rapidly, and those who follow developments are making smarter choices.”
• Because the competition is doing it: Weirdly, a very important reason for many online casino platforms to sponsor teams is that other online casinos are doing it. Picture it, you’re a well-known casino without Spelpaus in Sweden, but one of your competitors is sponsoring a football club that has been winning matches. This makes them much more visible than you. It doesn’t matter if you offer better bonuses or have a cleaner user interface; they have more eyes on them. Competition means you have to compete in as many ways as possible, and that includes in the advertising space.
• Rising digital engagement: This is more of a comment on why they weren’t advertising as sponsors more in the past. As betting platforms and casino without Swedish license become more flexible, mobile and digital, it makes sense for them to advertise in such flagrant ways.

Chelsea FC’s Gambling Sponsorships

Like virtually all of the other top-tier English football clubs, Chelsea FC has had its fair share of sponsorship deals with betting and gambling platforms. While it might not have been sponsored specifically by a casino without Swedish license, and it hasn’t had a shirt sponsor that is a gambling company, like some other clubs have, Chelsea has still had a couple of gambling sponsors.

Like many clubs, Chelsea has partnered with a number of different gambling operators across the world. These regional operators partner with football clubs; this allows the gambling operator to use iconography and imagery of the club, and for this service, the club gets some revenue in return. These types of deals boost not only the reputation and visibility of the gambling operators, but also of the football club.

Gambling Sponsorships Across the Premier League

Chelsea is by no means the only club with sponsorship ties to online gambling platforms; almost all of the major Premier League clubs have some sort of sponsorship deals with gambling operators.

Approximately half of the Premier League teams in the 2025-26 season have main shirt sponsors that are betting or casino-focused, most of which are international brands with operations that span multiple continents. This means that for many people, one of the things that is most associated with English football in the current age is gambling.

For many clubs, these gambling shirt-sponsorships are worth 10s of millions of dollars every year, but these sponsors are soon to be a thing of the past. With concerns about the visibility and normalization of gambling rising in the UK, gambling shirt-sponsorships have been agreed to be withdrawn at the end of the current season.

Gambling Sponsorships Are A Global Phenomenon

While the Premier League might be one of the most-watched football leagues around the world, that doesn’t mean that other leagues don’t also have their share of gambling sponsorships. In some regions, these sponsorships are a new and growing thing, while in others, like in the Premier League, steps are being made to limit their influence.

• Serie A: While gambling sponsorships have been very lucrative for Italian clubs in the past, Italy has taken steps to restrict gambling advertising in the sport. Interestingly, the outright ban on gambling sponsorships seems to have harmed the Italian sporting industry so severly that the Italian government is looking to reintroduce these sponsorships in a more controlled fashion.
• La Liga: Spain also has a ban on gambling sponsorships and advertising in its football league, but unlike Italy, it shows no sign of looking to reverse this decision. Almost all of the major Spanish clubs had previously been partnered and sponsored by gambling companies. This sponsorship vacuum appears to have been filled by cryptocurrency companies.
• South American leagues: Leagues across South America, from Campeonato Brasileiro Série A to Liga MX, have a long history of gambling sponsorships. For some leagues, this looks to continue, while others are facing similar regulatory changes as Europe has before them.

While different regions have different regulatory environments and are handling the potential issues with gambling sponsorships and advertising in different ways, we can see that gambling sponsorships were all but ubiquitous across most of the football world for the past decade or so.

Dancing to the Regulatory Flute

By far the biggest impact on gambling sponsorships for most regions is regulation. Almost every region in the world has a different, and often complicated, regulatory framework for what is and isn’t allowed when it comes to gambling advertising and sponsorship. As opinions shift and change, these regulations change as well. For some regions, these changes mean the loss of millions in revenue.

• The UK: As we mentioned earlier, the Premier League clubs have all agreed unanimously to remove their shirt sponsorships with gambling operators. This is a voluntary act that the clubs hope will appease a growing movement that is concerned with the visibility and potential harm that gambling can cause. Other sponsorships and partnerships with gambling entities such as betting platforms and casino without Swedish license will be unaffected.
• Europe: We already mentioned Spain and Italy, both countries have strict gambling advertising and sponsorship bans in place and football clubs in both countries are claiming that the loss in revenue has damaged their industry and is hurting their bottom lines. Europe is too big and complex a regulatory region to sum up otherwise; some regions allow gambling sponsorships, while others have outright bans.
• Asia: Like Europe, the regulatory environment across Asia is complex and multifaceted. The prevailing conditions are that gambling is going in the opposite direction in Europe, however. With Europe moving towards stricter regulation, many Asian markets are relaxing regulation. Sponsorships throughout Asia are often marketed in interesting ways to sidestep regulation, framed as things other than gambling.

It seems unlikely that a world consensus will ever be reached about gambling, and the realities of the fractured regulatory environment in which it exists are simply something that both operators and customers must navigate as they offer services or engage with those services.

How Important Are Gambling Sponsorships For Clubs?

With Spanish and Italian clubs claiming they are severely damaged by the gambling advertising bans in their countries, how important are gambling sponsorships for clubs exactly? For the Premier League, it seems the answer might be… some?

Looking at the current front of shirt sponsorship deals across the Premier League, all of the larger deals are with airlines and other industries, with most betting operators having smaller deals worth only a few million a year. However, not every club is going to be sponsored by Emirates for 20 years like Arsenal, and with operators of betting and casino without Swedish license platforms no longer considered as valid sponsors, many clubs look to lose out on millions in revenue every year.

While it is certain that some industry or other is likely to step in and fill that power vacuum, will they offer the same amount as betting platforms do? One of the reasons that betting platforms are happy to fork over millions in sponsorships is that they are just such a natural fit with sporting teams. It probably isn’t a lie to say that close to 100% of the people who bet on sports also watch sports. But we can see from Spain that with no betting sponsorships allowed, cryptocurrency companies have moved into that market; perhaps the same thing will occur in the Premier League?

Final Thoughts

The sponsorship landscape for Chelsea FC and the rest of the Premier League is changing, but it has changed before, and it will change again after this. While there might be short-term hardships and uncertainty, the club and league will continue on, and new sponsors will inevitably appear to support the clubs.

While from the start of the next season no club will have a front of shirt sponsorship with any betting company, clubs can still form other partnerships with platforms that offer betting or casino without Swedish license. This is likely to still present a good deal of revenue to Chelsea and other clubs across the Premier League.