The UNBELIEVABLE Rise And FALL Of Southampton.
With all the financial complications going on at the club when Everton announced that they had agreed on a ‘record-breaking’ shirt sponsor last June it was greeted with a mixed reaction.
In January 2020, during the club’s AGM, chief executive Denise Barrett-Baxendale said that ‘in an ideal world’ they would prefer a ‘different type of sponsor’ to a betting company, and this was reported at the time by the Daily Mail.
Since then, Everton have lost the sponsorships they had with USM Holdings which sponsored the club’s training ground and the women’s team lost their shirt sponsor MegaFon which was owned by USM Holdings and was founded by none other than, Alisher Usmanov.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Usmanov had all his assets frozen which meant that Everton had cut all ties with Usmanov and USM Holdings, but that left a gaping hole in the club’s finances.
In June of last year, the club announced a ‘£10m a season‘ sponsorship deal with betting company Stake.com. Established in 2017, Stake is the official betting partner with the UFC and has global ambassadors such as rapper Drake, UFC fighters Israel Adesanya and Jose Aldo, and former Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero.
Everton fans warned the club about sponsorship backfire
Less than two weeks after the club announced the ‘record-breaking’ deal with Stake, an online petition with over 30,000 signatures from Everton fans, urged the club to rethink.
Among the many reasons the fans wanted Everton to rethink its sponsorship deal was because their was talk that in the coming years, gambling sponsors are going to be banned from the front of football shirts and yesterday BBC reported that it could backfire sooner rather than later, in which it says.
‘The government looks likely to agree a deal with the Premier League which would see gambling sponsors’ names taken off the front of football shirts.
‘The gambling white paper is expected to be published in the coming weeks.’
Everton would not lose Stake as their sponsor completely, it would simply have to be removed as the main sponsor but could replace the current sleeve sponsor BOXT.
However, with that, it is to be seen if BOXT would increase their sponsorship deal to something similar to that of Stake.com but that is highly unlikely.
Stake.com is only going to be Everton’s shirt sponsor for one more season before they move into the new stadium on Bramley Moore Docks, in which time the club hope to have had new investment similar to Manchester City and Arsenal with Etihad and Emirates and how they are the shirt and stadium sponsors.
