Gambling's out, fintech's in: football's sponsorship reshuffle is a rework of the Barclays playbook

This season, for the first time, no Premier League shirt carries a gambling logo on the front. Everton have signed with trading platform CMC Markets, in a three-year deal reportedly worth up to £50m. Fulham brought in data firm ClickHouse. Crystal Palace picked Temporal. Manchester City extended their Revolut partnership to cover the men's team. Between them, these clubs are filling a hole in Premier League sponsorship revenue estimated at £80-100m a year.

The ban needed to happen. Gambling firms built a decade of brand trust on the backs of a captive audience of impressionable minds who could least afford to lose money to them, and I don't think anyone serious in payments or fintech would argue otherwise. But acknowledging that doesn't mean every fintech logo replacing a betting one is automatically wholesome. It means a genuine gap has opened up, and fintech happens to be well capitalised and hungry for exactly the kind of visibility football offers.

I've seen this film before, just running in reverse. In August 1987, with English clubs three years into a European ban after Heysel and the Today newspaper walking away from its sponsorship days before kick-off, Barclays stepped in with a £4.5m deal that saved the Football League's season and put its name on the competition, the Barclays League. Barclays' own retrospective on the deal, marking its 30th anniversary, quotes the Financial Times calling it a “last-gasp rescue”, and the Football League's own president at the time admitting it was “make or break” for the game. Barclays was buying association with a competition that badly needed a credible, establishment name attached to survive the hooliganism years. Fast forward to the early 2000s and the roles had completely reversed: Barclays was paying £48m for the title sponsorship, then extending it to £40m a season by 2016, fighting to keep its name on a competition that had become one of the most valuable pieces of sponsored real estate on the planet. Same brand, same sport, opposite dynamic, fifteen years apart.

I don't know for certain how this plays out for fintech, but my hunch is we're at the 1987 end of that cycle rather than the 2001 end. Fintech is buying access to a legitimacy vacuum gambling left behind, in front of an audience that skews toward a demographic most fintech products are trying to reach.

That access matters more than the logo. I've worked with two Premier League clubs on their “connected fan” strategy, and separately worked on Visa's own in-stadium experience as part of their football sponsorship. The interesting work isn't the sleeve or the shirt, it's what sits behind it: a payment credential that links your match ticket to what you buy in the ground or at the club shop, or unlocks public transport concessions to the ground on a matchday. Utilising that data to understand how the club can incentivise you to get to the ground slightly early and have that last beer at their bar, not the pub nearby. Or possibly even the validated credential that gets you into the ground for the game. Payments infrastructure is quietly becoming part of the matchday product itself whether the purist likes it or not.

I'm not a marketer, so I won't pretend to know the full playbook behind these deals, but I don't think it's a coincidence that fintech and big tech want their name on globally distributed content like the Premier League specifically. Somewhere in every one of these negotiations there's a CEO who supports a club, watches the games, and also happens to be the person signing off on which payments partner their business uses next. That's not the stated rationale in any pitch deck, but I'd be surprised if it isn't in the room.

Revolut's expanded City deal is a good example of the model maturing past the badge. Alongside the shirt, Revolut Business and Revolut Pay are being worked into the club's own operations. Arsenal have done something similar with Deel on the sleeve, who become the club's official HR platform partner as part of the deal. I don't think either club is thinking hard about vendor lock-in here, commercially they'll be far more focused on the sponsorship revenue landing than on what happens if the relationship ever needs to unwind. That's a fair trade for them to make. I just think it's worth someone in payments strategy pointing out that it's a trade.

Stevenage going fully cashless from this season is a smaller story but it's the one I keep coming back to. Financial inclusion is a genuine consideration, not everyone has access to a card or a bank account they're comfortable using at a turnstile. But so is the operating margin of a club that, like most outside the Premier League, runs at a loss most years. At Stevenage's scale, small efficiencies at the till add up fast. Nobody's forcing a fan to spend inside the ground, and I'd put money on there being a pub or a chippy within five minutes' walk who are still very happy to take cash on a Saturday. If the club has worked out that going cashless pays for itself, they owe it to themselves to try it.

Which raises the question I actually want answered: how well do football clubs know their own cost base, and how much revenue is sitting in front of them outside the sponsorship line that they're not yet set up to capture? A lot of the “connected fan” work I've done sits exactly there, not in the shirt deal but in what a club can learn about its own economics once payment data starts flowing through ticketing, concessions and travel in one place.

Something was always going to fill the gambling gap, and fintech is a sensible enough answer. I'd expect other verticals to have a look too, energy and utilities have the balance sheets for it, and I wouldn't be surprised to see consumer AI brands chasing the same visibility once gambling's exit fully lands. Whether any of this is “sportswashing” is a fair question, but I'd point it at crypto exchanges before I'd point it at CMC Markets or Deel. Crypto's sponsorship record in sport, FTX's Miami arena and Mercedes F1 deal both gone within a year of signing, Arsenal's own fan token adverts banned by the ASA for misleading supporters, is a genuinely different risk profile to a regulated trading platform or a payroll provider putting its name on a sleeve.

Curious whether others working in payments or sponsorship are seeing the same shape to this, or whether I'm reading too much into a logo on a shirt.

Sources referenced

'Last-gasp' rescue of the Football League — Barclays, 11/08/2017

CMC Markets Confirmed As Everton's New Main Partner — Everton FC, 01/07/2026

Everton to Close €35 Million Sponsorship Deal with CMC Markets — Finance Football

Revolut becomes a Global Partner and Official Back of Shirt Partner of Manchester City men's and women's first teams — Revolut, 13/02/2026

Deel and Arsenal announce multi-year sleeve partnership — Arsenal FC

New Arsenal sponsorship deal worth up to £25m a year — Daily Cannon, 01/2026

Stevenage FC Stadium to become cashless — Stevenage FC, 19/07/2026

Coinbase to sponsor NBA team in aftermath of FTX collapse — Cointelegraph

Arsenal adverts for cryptocurrency 'fan tokens' banned — The Guardian