Stoke City are the only club in the top two divisions who have a stadium as well as a shirt sponsored by a betting company
10:23, 13 Apr 2026
Stoke City play at the bet365 Stadium and have had their shirts sponsored by bet365 for 13 years.
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Stoke City play at the bet365 Stadium and have had their shirts sponsored by bet365 for 13 years.(Image: CameraSport via Getty Images)
The EFL is not poised to follow in the Premier League's footsteps and ban front of shirt gambling sponsorships.
Top flight clubs have voluntarily agreed to stop having betting companies on the front of their shirts from the end of this season, although it is reported that has left nine still chasing new deals. One club executive told The Guardian that shirt sponsorships "have dropped by around 50 per cent" in what has become "a very difficult market".
It was three years ago today when it was announced that these kind of sponsorship deals would be phased out. The Premier League released a statement saying it was working with other sports on the development of "a new code for responsible gambling sponsorship".
But the Championship will not follow suit. The division itself, like League One and League Two, is sponsored by Sky Bet on a contract that runs until 2029.
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Stoke City have long had close links with bet365, which was the club's parent company for several years. The shirt has been sponsored by bet365 since 2013 while the ground became the bet365 Stadium in 2016. It has helped Stoke maintain one of the highest commercial revenues in the Championship.
It has been a vital source of income, particularly since relegation in 2018. Part of the agreement with bet365 is to ensure that football is affordable within the community and Stoke have held season ticket prices at the same rate since 2008 and offered free coach travel to away games since 2013.
Stoke became divested from bet365 in the summer of 2024 when John Coates, whose family owns bet365, became sole owner.
EFL chairman Rick Parry has reiterated how much clubs under his watch are relying on this kind of sponsorship at a time when the Premier League has been reluctant to agree a new financial distribution.
He said when the Premier League ban was announced that betting companies had made “billions” of pounds out of sport since the introduction of the Gambling Act in 2005 and added: “It’s only fair that there is a way of channelling some of that revenue into sport.
“So enabling sport to negotiate marketing agreements to get a share of the billions that are flowing in is something I have no difficulty with whatsoever as a concept. We’ve commissioned research, we’ve looked extensively and we haven’t seen any evidence that sponsorship leads to an increase in gambling or gambling harm.
“The values of gambling in England have been fairly steady across the decades and there is no direct correlation between sponsorship and gambling harm. Nobody wants gambling harm, nobody wants players to become addicted, or indeed non-players. But it is two different issues that tend to get conflated in terms of what we are doing with players and indeed with the non players.”
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