Changing Trends in Sports Sponsorships

Sponsorships play an important role in sports for both teams and events alike, with some committing to hundreds of millions per year for a logo or a name to be displayed, recent years in particular have seen the rise of gambling and betting companies being the popular sponsors as a list of online casinos that have been used to sponsor can be readily found – but there’s now a changing trend in the sponsorship space, and could be looking to extend to more than just sponsorships with some of the money that is becoming involved.

(Image from theguardian.com)

For the past few years, betting companies and casinos have been such a prominent sponsor simply because of the number of eyes that different sporting events have – the Premier League in the UK is considered to be the most competitive and popular league in the world so it’s no surprise many companies would turn to this option, what may have been a surprise to some is that it was more common to have companies from Asia and Africa as the big sponsor with only a few English companies backing the teams, the millions spent was an extremely effective way to bring more eyes to the services offered.

It wasn’t just football either, it had become a huge part of the sponsorships rolled out in eSports as well as combat sports and similar but there is a changing trend in sports sponsorships – most notably as many of the biggest sponsor offerings are coming from the crypto space as companies and individual coins are getting involved. It was seen in motorsports a few years ago with the Doge Coin sponsor of a NASCAR team, and now also being seen in Formula 1 with a few big crypto sponsors starting to emerge, and it’ll only be a matter of time before they become direct team sponsors following other big events like the Super Bowl and the prominence it brought there too.

With such huge figures being put out there, and the exclusive deals coming out too, it may not be long before these sponsors turn into something more – looking at existing sports teams like Red Bull and their emergence in Formula 1 and similar show that enough growth changes the scales somewhat, and whilst it would be interesting to see a business sector become a full-fledged team similar to the likes of Red Bull, for now the huge sponsorship money is enough for the big bespoke deals, and the changing trend in sports sponsorships is leading to some interesting events and designs too.