2023 was the year gambling sponsorship and the Premier League decoupled.
In April, following growing discontent over gambling sponsorship in football – and across society more broadly – Premier League clubs announced a voluntary ban on front-of-shirt gambling sponsors.
Although the ban won’t be enforced until the start o f the 2026/27 season, it is set to shake up gambling’s influence in the league and will determine what types of sponsor fill the void.
But it’s not just the clubs who have signed with gambling companies that have faced backlash on social media and potential risk to their reputations.
InsightX has analysed all the front-of-shirt sponsors of the 2022/23 season and the risks posed to each club’s reputation in our second annual Premier League Sponsorship Review.
We have assigned them a risk rating based on due diligence investigations into the sponsor and the perception of every deal on social media. In this review, these due diligence investigations involved analysing key areas of risk including ethical, human rights, environmental and criminal litigation issues.
We rated them as low, medium or high risk. According to our research, Arsenal, Brighton, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City and Tottenham had the highest risk deals out of all the clubs in the Premier League last season.
Notable red flags in the review include potential links with money laundering, organisations or states with questionable human rights records, organisations which allegedly finance terrorist groups and deals with high carbon emitters.
The review also ranks the volume of social media conversation around sponsors and plots them against the sentiment of the conversations. It also analysed the potential brand exposure each club could have gained from its sponsor’s social media presence.
Every club is individually profiled in the report with more details on each deal, citing and linking to evidence and sources in the public domain.
To provide further context, the review outlines some of the sponsorship issues being discussed in the news including the UK Government’s review of the 2005 Gambling Act, a ban on front-of-shirt gambling sponsors and sponsors supportive of Hong Kong security law.
“This is the second year that we have published the Premier League Sponsorship Review following fantastic feedback from those who downloaded it in 2022.
Using InsightX’s unrivalled expertise in sentiment analysis coupled with our industry-leading due diligence and risk ratings, the review is the most comprehensive assessment of the impact of every Premier League club’s front-of-shirt sponsorship available. We hope that clubs, fans and everybody involved in football find it informative.”
InsightX COO, Justin Williams
To read the review in full, please download the Premier League Sponsorship Review here.
If you would like to discuss the review in further detail we invite you to contact the report’s author and InsightX’s Head of Insight, Veronica Ferrari: veronica.ferrari@insightxintel.com.
For more information about InsightX’s services or to order a report, please email editors@insightxintel.com.
