Is The Gambling Sports Sponsorship Craze Coming To Canadian Football?

If you’re watching a sporting event, chances are the players on the pitch will be wearing uniforms with sponsorship branding across them. It doesn’t matter the sport; sponsorship is a giant industry.

One thing you may have noticed recently, is that an increasing number of these sponsors are gambling companies, and while this is most prevalent in the UK’s top soccer league the Premier League, it can be spotted around the world. 

The Canadian Football League (CFL) has been so far fairly untouched by the influx of gambling based sponsorship, but is it just a matter of time? Is the CFL next in line? 

The Gambling Sports Sponsorship Boom

The growth of gambling companies as the main sponsors of sports teams is at its most apparent in the UK, and specifically in the English Premier League, the country’s biggest soccer league. 

Half of all Premier League clubs have a gambling company’s logo printed across the front of their shirts this season (2019/20) with the number more than likely to grow to even more than the current 10 of the 20 clubs in the league going forwards. 

This sponsorship sees clubs set to earn just shy of $350 million in sponsorship deals this season. Lioncasinos betting sites section has a great comparison of the top gambling sponsorships in the world of sports. 

In the second division in UK soccer, the Championship, the numbers are even more staggering, with 17 of the 24 clubs having gambling companies as their shirt sponsors. 

This trend is not popular with everyone in UK, the Labour Party, the opposition party in UK parliament, are against shirt sponsorship, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone. Indeed, the gambling industry suggested in previous years that they have a commitment to reduce advertising in English soccer, but based on the number of shirt sponsors from the industry this year, that doesn’t seem to be happening. 

The freedom offered in the UK is also present in some other markets, such as Australia, where sports sponsorship from gambling companies is also prevalent. However, this is not the case everywhere, and in the US market, there is still some grey area around it. 

The MLS, the US soccer league, became the first American sports league to allow shirt sponsorship, while the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL have reached a sponsorship agreement with Winstar Casino and the NBA as a whole has made a deal with MGM Resorts, while Caesars Entertainment has a separate deal with NBA team the Philadelphia 76ers. 

In the eyes of many, sponsorship deals are beneficial for both sides, but there is concern. Gambling advertising should, in the eyes of critics, be kept for post watershed where it is away from the eyes of young people, and shirt sponsorship and other sports sponsorships make that essentially impossible. 

Is Canada Next? 

While the CFL may not have the global impact of the NFL, but football remains the second most popular sport in Canada behind the NHL, and the CFL is considered integral to Canada’s sporting identity. 

However, the CFL is not as popular amongst the young, and there is an aim to change that by making the league more accessible, and for that, a budget is necessary, and for that, sponsorship is one of the best ways. With the highest paid CFL players making less than $1 million a year, the league is far from the size of the NFL, but there is interest, and it is an untapped market in terms of gambling sponsorship. 

Some 20 years ago, the first relationship developed between the CFL and online gambling, when the league seemed to be doomed for the scrapheap, but it came back, and this relationship is seen by many to have helped. With the CFL looking for another boost, it’s more than possible that revisiting the possibilities of relationships with the gambling industry, especially through gambling, could well be on the table. 

That being said, if the CFL wants to avoid gambling companies being as synonymous with sponsorship as they now are with the UK’s biggest soccer leagues, there is definite benefit in laying out some regulations in advance, because once the floodgates open to sports sponsorship for the gambling industry, it can grow incredibly quickly. 

Whatever the outcome, it’s going to be interesting to watch, and the smart money suggests it won’t be long until the bigger names in gambling start to be seen on the shirts and around the stadiums of the biggest CFL clubs. Who knows, it might even lead to that first million dollar contract!

 

Advocating for football prospects one story at a time.

Comments are closed.