Surely entertainment is one of the industries where margins are higher. Everyday lots of people spend money on gaming, sports and vacations. Some activities take place in the real world while others, like playing casino online, are only on the web. They have a common basic tough: they are fun and people are prepared to pay, also a lot of money, to have some fun in their lives.
If we think offline, Football is the most popular way of having fun. It is without doubt the champion of all sports in that sense. What do you get when you associate online casinos and football? Well, the answer is that you get football sponsorships. In this article, we have taken a look at why online casinos are more and more becoming big names in the football sponsorships.
Football, similarly to online casinos, it is not what it used to be few decades ago. Nowadays football players are celebrities on their own and as such they do attract a huge amount of football sponsorship deals. In recent years we have seen a long number of players that have massively benefit from this situation. Take for example Zlatan Ibrahimović who recently announced his partnership with Swedish betting brand Bethard. Thanks to his deal he added another 8 to 10 million to his salary according to UK casino review site Casinobiggestbonus.
In addition to sponsoring the main stars, online casinos have also closed a number of deals with top clubs in the last few years. The first betting company to appear as a shirt sponsorship in the English Premier League was in 2002 when Betfair Casino made a deal with Fulham. Since then lots of teams have benefitted by making lucrative deals with online casinos brands. Everton also signed a 5 year football shirt sponsorship with casino operator SportPesa that has been reported being worth 75 million pounds. Another company which has been very active in the football sponsorship area is Austrian operator bwin: back in 2006 they signed two huge deals with AC Milan and Manchester United for a total amount of around $36M.
The trend has expanded also to Turkey where Spor Toto, a Turkish state-owned betting company, has been serving as the Süper Lig’s title sponsor from 2010 until the end of 2017. The cost of this contract was an annual $25 million.
But why online casinos brands are so keen to invest millions in football sponsorships? Do they get a return of investment?
Well it is very difficult to know if all brands will get a return of investment but what is clear is that the main reasons for online casino brands to spend millions in sponsorships is that it allows their brands to be visible to millions of fans and also give a lot of credibility. Also it allow to associate the online ‘virtual’ fun of playing casino online with the offline ‘fun’ of playing football.
Even if most people do know that playing online casino online is safe, many still do not trust that their details will be safe and most importantly that the online casinos will give them a fair game. By going broad with football sponsorships, the trust can be immediately increased as if a company has millions to pay for a big deal like this, surely have the books in order and will not be trying to scam his members.
With so many online casino brands out there we expect that this trend will continue in the future: the only way for brands to make it in the long run is to get new players and also retain them. Many believe that the association between sports and gambling is not right but football do offer a great way, despite expensive, to increase the brand status in one or more countries and also create loyalty between football fans. Those are necessary ingredients to success for online gambling operators and the main reason why we are seen so many millions being spent in this way.
