For years, gambling companies became a familiar sight on Premier League shirts.
That changes from the 2026/27 season.
Premier League clubs collectively agreed in 2023 to stop gambling companies appearing on the front of matchday shirts. The decision was voluntary and was introduced after consultation with the UK government as part of efforts to reduce gambling advertising in football.
The change is now creating another question for clubs.
If gambling companies are leaving the most valuable advertising space on the shirt, who replaces them?
The early answer appears to be technology companies, financial businesses and other organisations looking for global recognition.
Reuters reported on August 7 that Premier League clubs are attracting a more diverse group of sponsors, including fintech businesses, sovereign investment organisations and large software companies. Nielsen believes software infrastructure businesses could become the biggest category of front of shirt sponsor by 2028.
On the surface, this is simply a sponsorship story.
Look more closely at what football supporters are saying, however, and it becomes something much more interesting.
The Premier League may be changing the companies appearing on shirts.
That does not automatically mean supporters will trust the companies replacing them.
Why gambling companies became so important to Premier League clubs
A Premier League shirt offers enormous global exposure.
Every weekend, the sponsor appears during matches watched around the world. It appears in photographs, highlights, video games, social media posts, merchandise and news coverage.
Gambling companies were prepared to pay significant amounts for that visibility.
This was particularly important for clubs outside the Premier League's biggest global brands.
A company such as Emirates, Standard Chartered or Snapdragon can justify spending tens of millions of pounds sponsoring a globally recognised club. Smaller Premier League clubs have fewer companies competing to pay similar amounts.
Gambling businesses helped fill that gap.
That is why removing them has created a commercial problem.
Earlier this year, The Guardian reported that Premier League clubs could collectively lose as much as £80 million from front of shirt sponsorship following the change. Clubs outside the traditional biggest teams were reportedly receiving offers around 50% lower than the £8 million to £12 million a season some gambling companies had previously been willing to pay.
This creates an uncomfortable reality.
Removing gambling companies might be popular with many supporters.
Replacing their money is much harder.
Technology and finance companies see an opportunity
This is where the new generation of sponsors comes in.
According to Nielsen's analysis reported by Reuters, companies from areas including software, AI, financial services and investment are increasingly interested in Premier League sponsorship.
It makes sense.
Imagine you run a technology company most consumers have never heard of.
You could spend years trying to build awareness through conventional advertising.
Or your logo could suddenly appear on the shirt of a Premier League football club.
Millions of people repeatedly see it.
Players wear it.
Supporters buy shirts carrying it.
Broadcasters show it.
The club posts photographs containing it.
The company quickly begins to look much bigger and more established.
This is why football sponsorship offers something beyond advertising.
It offers association.
And that is where Community Intelligence becomes important.
A football club is lending more than advertising space
Football supporters have relationships with their clubs that are very different from ordinary relationships between customers and companies.
People can support the same club for decades.
Families pass clubs between generations.
Supporters travel around the country following them.
The badge means something.
When another company places its name beside that badge, it benefits from some of that existing recognition and credibility.
A relatively unknown company can suddenly appear more established simply because it is associated with Manchester United, Everton, Aston Villa or another Premier League club.
But that relationship works in both directions.
Supporters also judge their club for the companies it chooses to associate with.
That is already visible in community conversations.
In one recent discussion about how clubs would replace gambling sponsors, supporters predicted that AI and cryptocurrency companies would move into the space. The tone was not necessarily positive. Some supporters were already questioning whether those replacements would actually represent an improvement.
Another recent football discussion celebrated the disappearance of gambling logos while immediately joking about crypto companies, defence companies and other potentially controversial replacements. One supporter specifically complained about an AI company appearing as a new shirt sponsor.
That tells clubs something important.
Supporters are not only judging whether gambling companies should appear on shirts. They are judging which companies deserve to appear there at all.
This is where the Customer Insight Triangle becomes useful
The Redditrepreneur's Customer Insight Triangle looks at three things together: what people say, what they do and what they ultimately choose.
Applied to football sponsorship, those three layers can produce very different information.
A supporter might say they dislike gambling sponsorship.
They might still buy the shirt.
They might then say they would prefer a technology company instead.
But when an unfamiliar AI or financial company actually appears on the shirt, they may immediately investigate it and decide they dislike that company too.
Simply asking supporters whether they support the gambling sponsorship change therefore does not tell clubs enough.
They need to understand what supporters actually consider an acceptable sponsor.
That could include questions around the company's industry, reputation, behaviour, ownership and values.
The important insight is not simply:
Fans dislike gambling sponsors.
It is:
What characteristics make supporters accept or reject any sponsor?
That is a much more useful commercial question.
There is also a Community Gravity problem
The Redditrepreneur's Community Gravity framework looks at how strongly a community can pull a company, product or decision toward its own expectations.
Football communities have extremely strong Community Gravity.
A football club cannot easily replace its supporters.
If supporters strongly dislike a sponsor, the club cannot simply find another community that cares less.
That gives fan opinion unusual power.
A sponsorship agreement might make perfect commercial sense on paper.
The company offers the most money.
The club accepts.
But if supporters begin researching the sponsor and discover controversies they dislike, the conversation can quickly move from:
“Who is our new sponsor?”
to:
“Why has our club agreed to work with this company?”
That creates reputational pressure for both organisations.
The sponsor wanted football to improve its reputation.
Instead, the partnership becomes the reason people investigate it.
For companies entering football sponsorship, understanding the community they are entering therefore matters almost as much as calculating how many people will see their logo.
Smaller clubs face the hardest decision
This issue becomes particularly difficult outside the Premier League's biggest clubs.
A discussion in r/TheOther14 earlier this year captured the problem well.
Supporters recognised that gambling companies had been willing to pay amounts that many conventional businesses simply could not match. Some worried that removing those sponsors could make it harder for smaller clubs to compete commercially with the league's biggest teams. Others believed losing the money was still preferable to continuing the relationship with gambling companies.
Both positions can be true.
A supporter can believe gambling advertising should disappear while also worrying about what losing millions of pounds means for their club.
That is why this is not simply a moral argument.
It is a commercial trade off.
The biggest Premier League clubs already have global businesses competing for their shirts.
Smaller clubs may have to choose between accepting less money or working with companies from emerging industries that supporters know very little about.
Community Intelligence can help clubs understand where supporters are willing to compromise and where they are not.
Gambling has not actually disappeared from Premier League sponsorship
There is another important detail.
The agreement applies specifically to gambling companies appearing on the front of matchday shirts.
It does not completely remove gambling sponsorship from Premier League football.
Gambling companies can still appear in other commercial positions, including sleeves and training partnerships.
That is already happening.
This means supporters could see fewer gambling logos in the most prominent position while continuing to encounter gambling brands elsewhere around their clubs.
Again, the community response matters.
If supporters believe the purpose of the change was to reduce the relationship between football and gambling, moving the same companies elsewhere may feel very different from genuinely reducing that relationship.
The difference between what a policy technically achieves and what communities believe it was supposed to achieve is exactly the kind of gap brands need to understand.
The Trust Collapse framework matters here too
The Redditrepreneur's Trust Collapse framework looks at what happens when communities stop giving an organisation the benefit of the doubt.
Football clubs generally start from a powerful position because supporters already have enormous emotional investment in them.
But repeated sponsorship controversies can gradually change how commercial decisions are interpreted.
One questionable sponsor might be treated as a mistake.
Several can create a different perception:
The club will work with anyone willing to pay enough.
Once that belief becomes established, every future partnership is viewed more suspiciously.
That is why sponsorship due diligence cannot only examine whether a company is financially capable of paying for the agreement.
Clubs also need to understand what supporters will discover when they search for the company.
What does Reddit say about it?
What controversies appear?
What do employees say?
What do customers complain about?
What does the company represent culturally?
And crucially:
What will supporters think their club's decision to accept the money says about the club itself?
That is reputational due diligence.
The bigger lesson for brands
There is a wider business lesson here that extends far beyond football.
Sponsorship works because two organisations share reputation.
The sponsor receives attention and credibility from the property it sponsors.
The property receives money and potentially credibility from the company associated with it.
But neither side gets to choose which parts of the other's reputation transfer.
That is why community research should happen before major partnerships are signed.
A spreadsheet can tell a Premier League club how much a sponsor is willing to pay.
Audience data can estimate how much exposure the company will receive.
Brand research can measure awareness.
Community Intelligence answers a different question:
What will the people who care most about this club think when they see that company on the shirt?
The Premier League's gambling sponsorship change is therefore about much more than removing betting logos.
It is creating a huge experiment in what supporters consider acceptable commercial partnerships.
Technology companies, financial businesses and other emerging industries now have an opportunity to occupy some of the most valuable advertising space in world sport.
But buying the space does not automatically buy the community's approval.
And as Premier League clubs are about to discover, the company offering the most money is not necessarily the company supporters most want representing their club.
The real commercial opportunity is not simply finding the next sponsor. It is finding one that can survive contact with the community.
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