Crypto’s Premier League Takeover – The New Frontier in Football Sponsorship

From the 2026/27 season, betting logos will be gone from the fronts of Premier League shirts. Names like Betano, Stake.com, and BJ88, fixtures on matchday kits for years, will disappear following the clubs’ voluntary agreement, struck in April 2023 partly to head off tougher government regulation in the wake of the UK Gambling White Paper.

The move will leave an £80 million gap in clubs’ budgets. And into that gap, the crypto industry is marching with considerable confidence.

The Scale of What’s Being Lost

To understand why crypto sponsorship matters so much right now, you first need to grasp how significant the gambling money was. During the years of the cooperation between the Premier League and the gambling industry, betting companies had become the financial lifeblood of many clubs, particularly outside the top six.

The collective value of gambling front-of-shirt deals exceeded £140 million per season. Industry analysts now warn that some clubs could lose more than half of their shirt sponsorship income overnight once the ban bites. The rumour around the league is that the highest offer from a non-gambling brand was less than half of what their betting sponsor had been paying. The average front-of-shirt value across the league is expected to drop by around 38%, a massive loss that demands a commercial answer, fast.

Enter Crypto

The digital assets industry has spotted this opportunity clearly. In the 2024/25 season alone, crypto companies invested close to £130 million in Premier League sponsorships, representing a 30% year-on-year increase. By 2025/26, 13 of the 20 Premier League clubs had entered into some form of crypto partnership, up from just eight the season before.

The deals span the league. Manchester City have a three-year sleeve arrangement with crypto exchange OKX. Chelsea’s BingX deal was worth around $10 million. Trading platform eToro, in one particularly aggressive push, secured partnerships with Arsenal, West Ham, Crystal Palace, and Everton simultaneously. Perhaps even more importantly, these are not fringe arrangements as they sit at the commercial heart of the Premier League’s biggest clubs.

Crypto firms are also pushing beyond shirt real estate into digital fan activations, NFT-based loyalty schemes, and exclusive trading promotions for supporters, making educational sites like Webopedia increasingly popular among football fans. Some platforms even use their football partnerships to drive downloads of companion apps and guides to services like the best wallets for USDT, targeting fans who are new to digital assets. Their pitch to clubs is straightforward: we are a global, digitally-native brand trying to reach a massive audience, and you have that audience. With over 3.2 billion viewers across 188 countries, the Premier League is essentially unrivalled as a marketing platform.

Is Crypto Just Gambling with a Different Logo?

This is the question that will define the debate going forward. Gambling brands, such as online casinos,  built their dominance by exploiting the subconscious connection between the thrill of football and the thrill of financial risk, which is arguably the same formula crypto is using today.

Cryptocurrency products can be highly speculative, enormously volatile, and are frequently marketed to young people using the same emotional techniques, like celebrity endorsement, promises of quick riches, and fear of missing out, that made gambling advertising so controversial in the first place.

The FCA concern is real and growing. A study by Investigate Europe found that a number of Premier League clubs in 2025/26 were sponsored by crypto firms not approved by the financial watchdog. Newcastle’s arrangement with VT Markets drew particular scrutiny, as VT Markets sits on the FCA’s warning list with no UK licence, with the regulator stating it “may be providing or promoting financial services or products without our permission.” It is not an isolated case either, with over 70% of Premier League clubs have at some point partnered with firms operating without proper FCA authorisation.

Football has already felt the consequences of poor due diligence. Leeds United dropped FXVC in 2023 after the FCA revoked its licence, and Atlético Madrid found themselves in litigation with WhaleFin after the exchange reportedly defaulted on a €20 million per season deal.

The Regulatory Tightrope

The UK’s financial promotions regime has covered cryptoasset advertising since 2023, which means clubs themselves carry compliance obligations when they platform a sponsor’s content. Clear risk warnings are mandatory, guaranteed-return promotions are banned, and HM Treasury’s draft FSMA (Cryptoassets) Order 2025 signals further tightening ahead. 

Some clubs have already appointed dedicated compliance officers to vet crypto marketing materials, a sign that the smarter operators in the game are taking this seriously.

Conclusion 

The end of gambling’s stranglehold on Premier League shirts is, in principle, a welcome development. But the question was never whether betting logos would disappear. It was always what would replace them, and on whose terms.

Crypto sponsorship is not inherently problematic. Well-regulated exchanges bring real commercial value to clubs that desperately need it, especially in the absence of the gambling revenue they’ve relied on. But the industry also contains actors with a documented history of consumer harm, and football’s passionate, emotionally invested fanbase is precisely the audience bad actors seek to exploit.

The Premier League earned genuine credit for acting voluntarily on gambling. It should not squander that goodwill by allowing crypto partnerships to grow in a regulatory vacuum. The standard it walks past is the standard it accepts.