Football shirts have lost betting logos, but the money is still circulating

The football kit reveals in July gave it away before anybody read a press release. There were 20 clubs, 20 new shirts, and a blank space where the sponsor should be on three of them.

Sunderland, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea all went into the season with the most valuable patch of fabric in English football unsold. Eleven of those 20 carried a betting brand there last season. None do now.

Clubs voted for this themselves in April 2023 and gave the league three seasons to sort out replacements. Plenty of time, everyone said at the time. It turned out to be plenty of time for about six of them.

Eleven clubs started this season looking different

Operators lost the one advert that shows up in every match photograph, every highlights clip and every replica shirt hanging in a club shop. That budget did not go back into a drawer.

Marketing teams moved it towards things they can count, and a sign-up offer is the easiest thing in the industry to count.

Telling a supporter at half-time that just 10 pounds to play is all it takes puts him two taps from an account, which no chest logo has ever managed.

Reported figures put the drop in front-of-shirt income across the league at somewhere around £80 million a year. That is the headline number.

The more interesting one is what clubs were offered instead, because deals outside the traditional top six came in at roughly half of what the betting firms had been paying.

Finance is now the biggest sector on Premier League chests, with airlines behind it. Solid, respectable and a good deal quieter about it than a bookmaker would be.

Reload and free spin promotions do the same work in the same window. A supporter with 15 minutes at half-time is a better prospect than the same supporter walking past a hoarding, and the offer can be tied to the match he is already watching.

Operators worked that out years ago. Losing the shirt front simply pushed more of the budget in that direction.

Sleeves and training kits got the money

Nothing stops a betting brand appearing on a sleeve, on a training kit, on the hoardings behind the goal or in a club’s official partner list.

Betano has been busy in exactly those slots. The ban covered one position on one shirt, and the industry read it that way from the start.

Fans noticed. Go through the replies under any kit launch this summer, and someone has pointed out that the logo moved eight inches to the left.

There is a decent argument that the visible change still matters, since a shirt front travels further than a sleeve does and ends up on children in playgrounds.

An equally decent argument, which was made by a select committee in parliament a couple of years back, says that pulling logos off shirt fronts does very little to the total number of betting adverts a viewer sees during a match. Both can be true.

How far the rules reach is a live question rather than a settled one. The Commons Library briefing on how gambling advertising is regulated sets out the framework the industry works within, and a Sporting Events Bill due for a second reading in September may add to it.

Casino products sit in the same shift. A slots or live dealer offer never suited a shirt front anyway, because nobody signs up to a casino because a centre back is wearing the logo.

Those brands were always going to end up where an offer can be clicked, and that is roughly where they are now.

Smaller clubs took the bigger hit

A commercial director at a mid-table club has the hardest job in this whole story. The betting money was reliable, arrived early and rarely asked for much beyond the logo.

Replacing it means selling a bank or an airline on a season that might end in a relegation fight. That is why a few shirts started the season blank. Not a design choice, and nobody at those clubs found it funny.

Sites running Premier League news have had a strange summer, because kit stories usually last a day and this year they ran for weeks. Shirt sponsorship turned into a transfer window of its own.

Money is still in football, just standing somewhere less obvious. Betting brands are on the sleeve, in the training-ground photos, on the hoardings, and in the offers landing in inboxes on a Saturday morning.

The shirt front was the loudest place to be. It was never the only one.