Everton’s new Stake.com shirt deal and dozens of other partnerships hang in the balance as government targets money laundering and offshore betting sites
The UK government wants gambling companies without a license to stop showing up on football shirts, stadium boards, and race tracks across the country, and it just opened the door to making that happen.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched an eight-week consultation on Wednesday looking at banning sponsorship and advertising deals between sports organizations and any betting operator that doesn’t hold a UK Gambling Commission license. If it goes through, the ban would strip unlicensed operator logos off kits, pitch-side boards, match programs, and stadium signage, and it would stop unlicensed firms from putting their names on leagues, tournaments, or venues altogether.
Two timelines are on the table. The government’s preferred route is a hard cutoff in August 2027, timed to land before the 2027-28 football season starts. The alternative would let existing sponsorship contracts run their course until August 2028. Officials say the earlier date would cause less disruption for clubs and give them time to line up licensed replacements. Anyone with a stake in the outcome has until September 9 to weigh in, and a final decision is expected before the year is out.
The case for the ban rests on two arguments: protecting people from gambling harm and cutting off a route that organized crime groups have used to launder money through sport. Regulators pointed to a national risk assessment that flagged football clubs and player agents as attractive targets for exactly that kind of activity. There’s also a simpler problem hiding underneath the finances. Fans in Britain have been getting around the rule that unlicensed sites can’t take bets from UK customers by just using a VPN, and the government is worried that a club crest or shirt logo makes an offshore operator look legitimate even when it isn’t regulated here at all.
Gambling minister Fiona Twycross tried to keep expectations in check, saying that while most sports and sectors would come through this untouched, some clubs would feel it.
No club illustrates that risk better than Everton. The Merseyside side signed a three-year sleeve sponsorship deal with crypto sportsbook and casino Stake.com just last month, reportedly worth at least £10 million, even after the government had already flagged in February that a crackdown was coming. Stake had been on the front of Everton’s shirts before, but that arrangement was always going to end this season under the Premier League’s own voluntary ban on front-of-shirt gambling logos. The sleeve deal was supposed to run through the end of the 2028-29 season. Depending on which timeline the government settles on, Everton could be forced to unwind the agreement after collecting as little as one year of it.
Stake’s UK situation is already messy. The brand technically exited the British market back in May 2025 after its white-label partner, TGP Europe, gave up its Gambling Commission license following findings that it hadn’t properly vetted its business partners and had broken anti-money laundering rules. TGP has also been tied to cases involving Macau gambling figure Alvin Chau, which hasn’t done much for confidence in how these arrangements get policed.
Everton isn’t alone. Chelsea and Ipswich both have sponsorship ties to 8Xbet, and Fulham has a deal with SBOTOP, neither of which holds a UK license. Last season, 11 of the Premier League’s 20 clubs carried a gambling logo on their shirts, and eight of those sponsors were unlicensed. Government figures suggest roughly 40 percent of Premier League clubs had some kind of unlicensed betting partner in the 2025-26 season alone. The impact stretches beyond football too. Stake has sponsored the Sauber Formula One team, and any similar arrangement going forward could mean stripping decals off the car ahead of the British Grand Prix, much like what already happened at the Dutch Grand Prix. Sportsbet.io, another operator without UK approval, sponsors the World Snooker Tour, which held eleven events in Britain this year. Horse racing has brushed up against the issue as well, with Sri Lankan bookmaker STBet having previously sponsored racing at Windsor.
There are limits to how far the proposed ban reaches. It only covers physical sponsorship and advertising, meaning banners, kits, and venue naming rights. Online ads and digital sponsorships would need a separate piece of legislation, and the government says it doesn’t yet have enough evidence to justify going that far, though it hasn’t ruled it out. Legitimate white-label arrangements, where a properly licensed UK operator runs a gambling product under a third-party brand, would also stay exempt for now, though officials say they’ll work with the Gambling Commission to figure out whether tighter oversight is needed there too.
Not everyone is content to wait for legislation to catch up. Entain, the parent company behind Ladbrokes and Coral, has pushed for faster and broader action. Chief executive Stella David didn’t hold back in her assessment of the operators the ban targets, saying they’re “often little more than fronts for organised crime” that “target vulnerable consumers, pay no UK tax, and ignore safeguards licensed operators must provide.” Entain has written directly to Premier League chief executive Richard Masters asking clubs to voluntarily drop unlicensed sponsors immediately, starting with pitch-side LED boards, rather than waiting until 2027 or 2028. The company also reached out to David Kogan, chair of the Independent Football Regulator, pushing for governance changes.
Entain’s bigger worry is that a sponsorship ban alone won’t touch the real growth area for illegal gambling, which is online. Citing figures from H2 Gambling Capital, the company says illegal gambling turnover in the UK jumped from roughly £5 billion in 2019 to £16.6 billion in 2025, and could double again by 2028. Separate analysis from the Betting and Gaming Council and the World Advertising Research Centre estimates unlicensed operators could account for nearly half of all UK gambling ad spend in the 2026-27 season, adding up to around £800 million funneled through social media, streaming platforms, affiliate sites, and influencer marketing. The government set up an Illegal Gambling Taskforce back in January to get tech platforms, advertisers, and payment processors working together on the problem, and Entain wants that group to lean harder into social media and affiliate networks rather than treating stadium sponsorship as the whole fix.
None of the operators named in connection with these deals have been accused of any wrongdoing. But the consultation makes clear that the UK is done treating shirt sponsorships as a gray area. For clubs that leaned on unlicensed betting money to boost their commercial revenue, the countdown clock is now running, and it’s a question of when the bill comes due, not if.