Premier League side Everton FC have signed a club-record deal with betting firm Stake.com to take over as the club’s front-of-shirt sponsor, starting with the 2022-23 season.
Everton announced the deal on its website on Thursday, June 9. It is set to start on July 1 and “is the highest value front-of-shirt deal in the Club’s 144-year history.”
Stake.com’s logo will appear on the front of both Everton’s men’s and women’s teams, as well as on screens and backdrops at their home stadium, Goodison Park, their training ground and across their digital platforms.
“Stake.com is an ambitious organization with impressive growth plans and we’re all very excited to enter into a partnership with them at this stage in their journey,” said Everton chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale.
“My talented colleagues in our new Revenue Team have made excellent progress in recent months and worked tirelessly to secure what is the biggest main partnership deal in the Club’s history — I’d like to congratulate them on this achievement and, on behalf of everyone at the Club, express my gratitude to Stake.com for choosing Everton as a long-term partner.”
Last season, the logo of car retailer Cazoo appeared on the front of Everton’s shirts. The Liverpool Echo reports that Everton declined a two-year extension of the deal with Cazoo, which was initially worth about £9.6 million ($12 million US) per year.
Stake.com’s logo appeared on the front of Watford FC’s shirts during the 2021-22 Premier League season. Watford was relegated and will play in the English Football League Championship in 2022-23.
(Courtesy royalbluemersey.sbnation.com)
The timing of Everton’s deal is curious given that the United Kingdom government has been musing for some time about banning betting firms from signing front-of-shirt sponsorship deals with football clubs. Some Premier League clubs are already moving away from betting firms as sponsors this season, including Wolverhampton Wanderers and Crystal Palace.
Barrett-Baxendale herself told the club’s annual general meeting in January 2020 that “in an ideal world” the club wouldn’t have a betting firm as a main sponsor, the Echo reports. At that same meeting, though, she told the crowd that such deals would be a “commercial decision.”
Stake.com was founded in 2017 and currently has more than five million registered users. It has partnerships with the UFC and several MMA fighters, along with rapper Drake and soccer superstar Sergio Aguero.
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