Betting Brands Have 12 Months to Figure Out What’s Next

Image credit: Emerson Vieira - via Unsplash

The Premier League starts up again this weekend (or 'EPL' for you international fans). 

Once upon a time, English football shirts were emblazoned with the names of consumer icons: JVC on Arsenal, SHARP on Manchester United, TDK on Crystal Palace. Sponsors that lived in your living room, not in your browser’s cookies. Fast forward to today and you can’t swing a corner flag without hitting a betting logo. From Bet365 to LeoVegas, the football shirt has become a shortcut to awareness - the advertising equivalent of buying a ticket right in the front row.

But that shortcut is about to close.

From the 2026/27 season, betting brands will no longer be allowed to sponsor the front of football shirts in the English leagues. Which means that next season is their last hurrah for buying eyeballs. Sure, there will be the blunt, un-creative pivot to buying up the shirt sleeve inventory. But after that? They’ll need to EARN them… through fan insight, lateral thinking, and creativity. The easy route to awareness is gone. Time to lace up.

Step One: Forget the “average fan”

How many times have you watched an advert from a sporting sponsor, and the fan within you says “Urgh, they don’t get it do they?” or “No-one has used that slang or in-joke since 2015”?

Real fans have moved on by the time it’s become popular, and light years before brand marketers have decided the 'casual' or 'average' fan are now all caught up. The 'average fan' is a mirage. Chasing them leads you to the land of bland. The brands that will thrive are the ones who know their audience well enough to drop an inside joke and watch it ricochet across group chats.

When we launched Peroni’s global Scuderia Ferrari partnership, we embedded dozens of Easter eggs - subtle nods, winks, in-jokes only the Tifosi would catch. Sky Bet have also adopted this approach recently, with radio ads that are just a rolling wave of football slang and match-day references. Sometimes, it’s better to mean everything to someone, than nothing to everyone. 

Step Two: Play with the media, not just in it

Creativity in sport marketing doesn’t have to mean another glossy TVC. Look at Burger King’s Stevenage Challenge - a cheeky bet that turned a tiny sponsorship into a season-long, gaming-fuelled stunt. Or Nike’s Chalkbot during the Tour de France, where fans tweeted messages that were then printed in chalk on the race course. 

Ambitious brands could even lean into the rise of branded entertainment. Take ASICS’ Mind Games, a long-form social experiment to see if exercise could boost mental performance in everyone from chess grandmasters to pro gamers. It wasn’t an ad - it was a value-adding enquiry into performance, a brand act, and something with lasting legacy. 

Step Three: Be genuinely useful

Football fandom is basically a love affair conducted in the comments section - passion mixed with an endless list of gripes and annoyances. Find something fans need and give it to them.

When we worked with Asahi and Manchester City, the training kit launch was never going to get hearts racing… until we built an AR experience around it and folded in influencers, turning it into one of the most talked-about kits City have ever released.

Or look at Supercell’s Payback Time. Instead of harnessing Haaland’s fanbase, they harnessed the frustrations of the many, many more rival fans that have to put up with him scoring and breaking records. By integrating him into ‘Clash of Clans’ (a game he had been playing himself for over a decade) the games developer gave millions of fans around the world the chance to destroy Haaland and steal his gold. Brilliant. 

The takeaway?

The shirt blackout could be the best thing that ever happened to betting brands. It will force a category that’s relied on prime real estate to start thinking like insurgents again. To think wider, deeper, and with more cultural savvy about how to inspire, entertain, and connect.

At Trouble Maker we run a Challenger Mapping process for all clients, to help them find the soft zones in between the lines, and the spaces in behind the full-backs (vis-a-vis - the challenger connection points with fans, media and brand). 

The clock’s ticking. Twelve months until the easy eyeballs disappear. Then it’s all about earning them.