Lock in a year of Digiday+ for 35% less. Ends May 29.
Premier League gambling ban gives brand sponsors an open goal, but CMOs must still prove value
A ban on U.K. gambling brands’ soccer sponsorships has created a glut of partnership opportunities for consumer marketers. But while CMOs sizing up the opportunity have leverage for now, they’ll face pressure to prove it’s worth the price tag.
Arsenal won the Premier League, which concluded on May 24. But with almost a dozen kit sponsors relegated due to a voluntary front-of-shirt ban kicking in this summer, a number of top soccer clubs are competing to attract fresh partner brands. Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, Brentford and Everton have announced their next sponsors already, leaving eight Premier League clubs — including Chelsea and Newcastle United — still on the table.
According to a research note published last week by Gartner, sponsorships account for 18.2% of marketers’ non-digital spending, but 84% of CMOs “struggle to quantify” their value.
Gambling brand exit
During the 2024/2025 season, Premier League sponsorship spending exceeded £1.5 billion, ($2.01 billion), per Ampere Analysis. Investment by gambling brands was exceeded only by financial services companies last year, accounting for 8% of total U.K. soccer sponsorship deals in 2025 according to Nielsen — more than apparel brands, tech or booze advertisers.
English Premier League clubs command high prices for their shirt sponsorships. Aston Villa kit sponsor Betano, for example, paid £40 million ($53.9 million) for its two-season deal, according to Nielsen data shared with Digiday. Other categories have stepped up their spending in recent years. Qualcomm’s deal to stamp its Snapdragon brand across the chest of Manchester United players, for example, cost it $75 million a year, in a five-year deal set to run to 2029.
Financial services brands such as consumer banks and credit card companies (Standard Chartered sponsors Liverpool FC) have grown their investments in sports sponsorships, meanwhile. The category now accounts for 22% of sponsorship value in the U.K. and 15% worldwide, according to Nielsen.
Despite rising spend, the breadth of clubs looking for their next sponsor is likely to cause a dip in sponsorship valuations.
“Betting brands are always charged a premium versus other categories,” said Malph Minns, founder and managing director of consultancy Strive Sponsorship. “Then there’s also a supply and demand thing, where you’ve suddenly got 11 clubs all in market at the same time.”
As a result, Minns told Digiday that one club had seen a 40% reduction in the sticker value of its front-of-jersey sponsorship. Shirt sleeve sponsorships (as yet outside the ban) continue to rise in value, however.
The U.K. government’s approach may grow stricter yet. A consultation launched this spring is currently exploring banning companies without British gaming licenses from sponsoring clubs, or indeed preventing any gambling brand from any type of sports sponsorship. That could open up further opportunities for brands in other categories.
The research gap
This summer, marketers will have several clubs to choose from — while also weighing partnership options in other sports or leagues. They’ll also be thinking about ways to monitor the impact of their investment.
Until recently, sports sponsorships were immune to marketers’ thirst for metrics, data and targeting. Clubs, franchises and leagues leaned on measures such as “media value” to put a dollar sign on the exposure granted to a shirt or sleeve sponsor, while CMOs — just as susceptible as the rest of us to getting caught up in the passion and romance of sport — typically adopted a looser approach to evaluating partnerships than they did for paid social or television investments.
“Some people pick [sponsorships] based on me-search, not research,” said Sarah Larsen, CMO of Hisense.
“I am stringent about who we partner with, because I don’t think that just having the ability to stamp FIFA on something means a consumer is going to buy it,” Larsen said. “If it’s multiple millions and millions of dollars that I’m spending on it, and it’s not driving millions and millions dollars of sales, it’s not worth it.”
Measurement in the field has changed in recent years. A nascent segment of sports-specialist ad tech firms like Relometrics, GSIQ and WeHave now offer the ability to track and monitor the impact of sponsorships, while CMOs struggling to work with tighter marketing budgets are keen to squeeze every cent of value from their jersey patches and official partner designations.
“While [sponsorship] can do a job for short-term sales, really it’s a brand-building platform,” said Minns. “CMOs are being judged on immediate returns, and it’s harder to build for the long term.”
Some sponsors are already putting impact-monitoring systems in place. HCL Tech, for example, sponsors the European golf DP World Tour, Cricket Australia and is the official AI partner of MetLife Stadium, as well as the New York Jets and New York Giants, who play there. The company worked with ReloMetrics and consultancy Brand Finance to monitor the impact of those partnerships, by tracking exposure on television and social media.
Corporate hospitality is a key draw for B2B sponsors, and the firm is “extremely militant” about tracking which visitors its sales teams had invited along to use its VIP ticket allowance at MetLife, according to CMO Jill Kouri.
HCL is among several IT and tech companies leaning harder into sports deals. Crystal Palace’s next kit will bear the logo of software firm Temporal, for example, while AI company Cohere began sponsoring the Aston Martin Formula One team in March.
Whiskey brand Jameson works with Nielsen, and uses a custom media mix model (MMM) to monitor the benefits it draws from its partnership with Major League Soccer (MLS), according to Kristen Colonna, Jameson’s vp of marketing.
“When we make a long-term strategic partnership like this, we’re not looking to assess the ROI just within the confines of like a 12 month period or fiscal year,” she said. Colonna added that multiple sources of measurement were necessary to fully understand the impact of the partnership. “We also look at general brand health indicators as well,” she said.
Kouri said that relationship tracking and the exposure data HCL gets from ReloMetrics helped inform the decision to extend its partnership with MetLife, which originally began in 2022.
“That would not have happened had we not been able to have all of this data to share with our top leadership to ensure they realize the value that we’re getting out of the relationship,” she said, without providing financial specifics regarding the deal.
As more CMOs look to sponsorships to provide an assist to brand-building efforts, CFOs will demand higher levels of scrutiny, as they have with all forms of marketing spend.
“When they think about sponsorships, they are thinking about those big picture, longer term plays: building brand affinity, visibility, connection, trust. [But] CMOs can get a lot smarter about how they think about the broader play,” said Gartner analyst Nicole Greene.
While sports sponsorships might have been treated as a different form of investment than other marketing expenditure, Greene said marketers should apply the same scrutiny to sponsorships as they do to digital media spend.
She concluded: “Your sports sponsorships can’t live in isolation.”
More in Marketing
In Graphic Detail: Why OpenAI’s ad business is still a work in progress
As OpenAI is reportedly gearing up to go public as early as September, Digiday has charted the promise, and early tensions behind its ad business.
The AI paradox: Marketers trust AI to buy media, not build brands
Some executives are wary of AI-generated creative ideas while using automated tools to brainstorm campaigns.
As OpenAI’s ChatGPT ad delivery improves, the doubts it created aren’t so easily fixed
The ad delivery has improved in the past few weeks, but some are now hesitant until those issues are completely ironed out.