The role that casino sponsorship has in football

For many years, casinos have been heavily involved within football. From football themed games to being official sponsors of clubs, it’s had a massive impact on the game. If you look at the top teams around the world, a large portion of them are sponsored by various casinos. These casinos offer such games as Fishin Frenzy at Virgin Games, where millions of people all over the world log in to play each year. It’s clear these casinos are becoming a powerhouse in the footballing world and are here to stay.

Whilst football is the biggest sport in the world and with so much money being involved, you’d imagine this has always been the case. However it’s only in recent times that the money involved has increased due to numerous different sponsorships and investments, it’s now at an all time high.

In this article we’ll be taking a look into the role that casino sponsorships has in football and what impact it’s had to make the sport what it is today.

Sponsoring specific clubs

With more and more money going into football each year, every team is constantly looking for more ways to improve their revenue. One way clubs have started doing this is via sponsorships. When you look at a team's kit, they’ll have the main shirt provider such as Nike or Adidas, however then they’ll have a further one or two secondary sponsors on the kit which can be anyone.

This season, a number of Premier League clubs have had casino sponsors on their kit, showing just how powerful they are in the footballing market. With each club charging millions to have these sponsors on there, it must be proving beneficial to the casinos to have this publicity.

Bringing in new fans for casinos

With the number of people that tune in to watch football every week, it’s a no brainer for casinos to sponsor a football team, as this will mean tens of millions of fans seeing your company on the clubs’ kits.

With each passing game, more and more people are viewing this, and each time this you may be bringing in a potential new customer. Some new players may never have seen or heard about your company if it wasn’t for watching the football, meaning all of a sudden you’ve hit a whole new target audience that would’ve otherwise been missed.

Whilst it’s a massive outlay to initially sponsor the football team, once you’ve done it, it will basically pay for itself and more with the new customers it will bring in with the potential for them to be long time returning players.

How clubs use these additional funds

Player transfers

One of the most obvious ways in which players use additional funds from sponsors is via the purchase of new players. It’s the thing that all fans get most excited about, the announcement of a new player. These signings can make or break a season for a team and is something that extensive work goes into to decide which players will be signed.

Since Neymar moved to Paris SG for a world record fee, it massively inflated the market meaning transfers are a lot more expensive than before so clubs need all the help they can get from different forms of income.

Upgrading facilities

Another way in which clubs will use sponsorship money is to upgrade their facilities. This can go from the training facilities to the youth team set up and all work towards improving the team both in the present and in the future. With better facilities, the teams can train better, more efficiently and recover better, meaning they then perform better on the pitch.

It’s common for clubs to improve their existing training facilities or sometimes open brand new ones all together with state of the art technology designed to take players and the club to the next level.

Not only does this offer the players a brand new facility to train at, if they’ve built a new training ground, the club will then usually look to sell the old one, again bringing back some of the funds they spent on creating the new state of the art one.

These days casinos and football go hand in hand, they both offer the same exciting edge of the seat excitement whilst also bringing two sets of players and fans together crossing over between the two.

Since casinos started being involved in football, they’ve allowed clubs to grow and thrive with the additional sponsorship money, allowing these clubs to then reinvest it into new players and infrastructure that previously may not have been possible without it.

With there being no sign of this relationship slowing down anytime soon, what next for football and casinos?