The Premier League’s ban on gambling companies as front-of-shirt sponsors is in force for the first time this season, and Liverpool are among the clubs it does not touch.
Standard Chartered has occupied the front of the shirt for well over a decade. The club’s last betting partnership, with SportPesa, ended in 2020. That timing now looks useful rather than incidental.
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Elsewhere in the division it has been a costly reset. Clubs voted 18-2 in April 2023 to phase out front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship from the end of last season, and the change removed more than £100m in annual deals across the league. Roughly a third of clubs had to find a replacement, and some opened the campaign without a main shirt sponsor at all.
What the ban actually covers is narrower than the headlines suggested. It applies to a gambling company’s logo on the front of a matchday shirt. Sleeve deals, training kit, LED advertising and ground hoardings all remain permitted, which is why gambling branding has not disappeared from a Premier League broadcast so much as moved a few feet.
For the substantial Irish contingent in Liverpool’s support, the picture is different again, because Irish law reaches further than a voluntary league agreement. The Gambling Regulation Act 2024 prohibits distributing replica kit and merchandise in children’s sizes carrying gambling branding in the Republic, a restriction with no Premier League equivalent. Liverpool’s bank sponsorship keeps the club clear of that too, but it changes what Irish retailers can stock across the rest of the league.
League of Ireland clubs sit closer to the issue than any Premier League side, since bookmaker money runs through shirt sponsorship and ground advertising at that level and those clubs fall directly under Irish rules rather than a league agreement drawn up in England. Supporters who follow both the domestic game and Liverpool are watching two different sets of restrictions apply to the same industry.
The wider Irish regime moved this summer as well. Operators taking bets from customers in the Republic have needed a licence from the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland since 1 July, replacing the system previously run by the Revenue Commissioners. Licences are arriving in phases, and applications for gaming and lottery categories are scheduled across 2027 and 2028.
That leaves online casino sites outside the Irish system for the time being, still answering to regulators elsewhere, so the licence behind each one differs. Trusted reviews covering the best online casinos in Ireland set out which authority each site actually reports to. On the betting side the Irish licence is now the only one that counts.
The commercial consequences of all this land unevenly, and that is the part with a bearing on the pitch. Clubs that lost a headline gambling deal are absorbing a revenue gap in the same window they were trying to strengthen. Front-of-shirt income is among the largest single commercial lines on a Premier League balance sheet, and replacing it at short notice tends to mean accepting less. Liverpool went into the window with the shirt already settled and the transfer coverage dominated by the search for a midfielder rather than a sponsor.
Andoni Iraola’s first season has moved quickly enough since. The 2-2 draw at Newcastle United brought his opening competitive points before Nottingham Forest came to Anfield, with preparations at the AXA Training Centre shaped by a window that ran to its final week and by Curtis Jones’s move to Inter Milan.
None of it alters a team sheet. It does mean the shirt Liverpool wear this season is one of the few in the division that did not need renegotiating.
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