32Red to end Swansea shirt deal
Operator will have sponsored Welsh football club for four years at the end of the 2012-13 FA Premier League season.
Gibraltar-licensed operator 32Red has agreed to forego the final year of its shirt sponsorship deal with League Cup winning football club Swansea City.
The agreement was first announced in 2009, before being extended for three years in 2011, however the operator has agreed to end the deal a year early in exchange for a sum of £950,000, a sum which CEO Ed Ware told eGaming Review “…was impossible for us to refuse.”
“The club are clearly interested in attracting not a new shirt sponsor necessarily, but a sponsor who can help them develop the stadium and do other weird and wonderful things, which isn’t necessarily where we are – they approached us and asked is it possible that we can terminate early in exchange for some cash and eventually we agreed,” Ware explained.
Swansea were in English football’s second tier when the deal with 32Red was initially agreed, however the club has since earned promotion to the Premier League and earlier this month won the League Cup for the first time in its history.
The club’s success follows Aston Villa’s top-six Premier League finish in 2008 when the club’s shirts were also sponsored by 32Red, and Ware said “We hope we are a lucky charm.”
The operator has yet to announce another sports-focused sponsorship deal, however Ware explained: “I would say our modus operandi is pretty opportunistic, so if something comes up in football that we like then we’d go for it, but there’s no guarantee of that.
“There are possibilities in Italy, and there are other offline sporting events which may tickle our fancy in terms of making an investment and extending the brand in those areas,” he added. 32Red only entered the Italian market in November last year, one week before the award of the first authorisations for online slots in the country.
A number of other egaming operators have betting partnerships with Premier League football clubs, with bwin.party’s agreement with Manchester United among the more high-profile.
In addition to 32Red, four Power 50 operators have shirt sponsorship agreements with clubs in the division for the current 2012-13 season: Genting (Aston Villa), bet365 (Stoke City), SBOBet (West Ham United) and 12Bet (Wigan Athletic).
(Photo courtesy of This is South Wales, under Creative Commons licence)