How Crypto Became the New Face of Sports-Washing

In the 2024/25 season alone, crypto-related sponsorships across English football have been valued at approximately $170 million, according to research from Deloitte’s Sports Business Group. That figure nearly replaces the annual value previously contributed by the gambling sector to the top-flight clubs almost overnight.

Key Takeaways:

Crypto sponsorships are becoming increasingly visible in UK football as gambling sponsorships face tighter restrictions.
Sports-washing happens when a brand, state, organisation or industry uses sport to improve its reputation or distract from wider concerns.
Crypto firms may use football sponsorships to gain legitimacy, visibility and trust among fans.
The line between crypto exchanges, crypto casinos and gambling-style products is often blurred.
Fans may face risks from volatile crypto assets, gambling-like incentives, misleading promotions and weak consumer protections.
UK clubs should apply stricter due diligence, stronger exit clauses and FCA-style consumer protection standards before entering crypto partnerships.
Anyone who has lost money after a crypto-related promotion should gather evidence and seek regulated advice.

For many clubs seeking new sources of revenue amidst rising transfer fees and commercial competition, crypto may seem like a solution, especially with the increase in people in the UK owning cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology is marketed as transparent, global, and innovative, a perfect match for football’s international fanbase.

However, the rise of cryptocurrency sponsorships suggests that the underlying risks may be shifting rather than disappearing, with clubs potentially finding themselves exposed to a new set of financial uncertainties. This transition highlights the need for careful scrutiny, as the replacement of one controversial industry with another does not necessarily resolve concerns over fan welfare or the integrity of club partnerships.

What is sports-washing?

Sports-washing is the use of sport to improve the public image of a person, company, state, industry or organisation. It usually involves attaching a brand or entity to a beloved sport, club or athlete in order to build credibility and soften public perception. This can happen through shirt sponsorships, stadium naming rights, tournament partnerships, celebrity ambassadors, fan tokens or branded digital campaigns.

The goal is not always direct product sales. In many cases, the deeper aim is legitimacy. By appearing alongside trusted clubs and iconic sporting moments, controversial brands can position themselves as mainstream, exciting and socially acceptable.

In football, sports-washing is especially powerful because clubs are deeply tied to identity, loyalty and community. Fans may feel a strong emotional connection to their team, which can make sponsor messaging feel more familiar and trustworthy. When a crypto brand appears on a shirt, stadium banner or club app, supporters may assume the club has carefully vetted that sponsor.

That assumption can be dangerous if the sponsor operates in a high-risk, poorly understood or lightly regulated space.

Why Crypto Stepped Into Sport

Crypto stepped into sport at a time when clubs were looking for new revenue streams. Football clubs face constant pressure to fund player wages, transfers, stadium development, global marketing and commercial expansion. As gambling sponsorships came under growing regulatory and public pressure, crypto firms saw an opportunity.

Sport offered crypto companies visibility, mainstream credibility and access to millions of highly engaged fans. For crypto firms, football sponsorships also helped shift public perception. A platform that may otherwise seem complex, speculative or risky can appear more trustworthy when promoted by a major club.

This is especially important in an industry where consumer confidence can change quickly. Crypto sponsorships also work well because many fans are young, digitally active and familiar with online finance, apps, trading and gaming-style platforms. This overlap makes football a valuable route into the mainstream.

However, the commercial opportunity comes with risk. Cryptocurrency remains volatile, and some crypto-related products are poorly understood by ordinary consumers. Where sponsorships promote speculative assets, fan tokens, crypto casinos or high-risk platforms, clubs may expose supporters to financial products they do not fully understand.

How Crypto Sponsorship Can Function as Sports-Washing

Crypto sponsorship can function as sports-washing when it uses the credibility of sport to soften concerns about risk, regulation or consumer harm. A football partnership can make a crypto brand look established and safe. When a club announces a partnership, many fans may see that as an endorsement, even if the commercial agreement does not guarantee the safety of the product.

This can be particularly concerning where the sponsor operates in a high-risk area such as crypto trading, fan tokens, NFTs, gambling-style rewards or crypto casinos. Sports-washing can also distract from the instability of the wider crypto market. A brand may present itself as innovative and fan-focused while avoiding deeper questions about volatility, customer protection, ownership structures, regulatory status or the sustainability of its business model.

The concern is not that every crypto sponsorship is automatically improper. The concern is that some sponsorships may give risky products a veneer of trust they have not earned. For supporters, that can blur the line between entertainment, investment and gambling-style behaviour.

A Wealth Recovery Solicitors manager says: “Crypto sponsorships can create a powerful impression of legitimacy, especially when they appear alongside trusted clubs and leagues. Fans should remember that a commercial partnership is not the same as a guarantee that a crypto product is safe, regulated, or suitable for them.”

The Rise of Crypto Casinos in Football

Across Europe and in the Premier League, the line between crypto exchanges, crypto casinos and gambling operators is becoming increasingly blurred. In the 2024/25 season, multiple Premier League clubs signed partnerships with crypto firms. Analysts counted as many as 14 of 20 clubs with some form of crypto partnership that season.

Similarly, Play the Game’s 2024 research found more than 150 betting and crypto partnerships across top leagues in Europe, India and Nigeria. The research also documented cases of crypto platforms presenting themselves in gambling-like ways or using token schemes to replicate gambling-style incentives.

Several clubs have already seen their reputations tested by ill-fated partnerships, including:

In 2022, Manchester City suspended its deal with ThreeKeys Capital after concerns were raised about the crypto firm.
Stake.com, a hybrid crypto casino and sports betting platform, appeared on Everton’s kit in 2023/24 and remained visible through later seasons.
Stake.com’s involvement drew criticism due to its use of unregulated digital currencies despite tighter UK gambling restrictions.

These examples show how quickly reputational risk can crystallise. When a sponsor collapses, freezes withdrawals or becomes subject to enforcement action, clubs may face angry fans, cancelled merchandise deals and media scrutiny. However, while the commercial and reputational consequences for clubs are significant, the impact on fans is arguably even more concerning.

Crypto casinos often operate around the clock and from jurisdictions with limited oversight. These platforms can pose heightened risks for consumers, including underage access and use in countries where online gambling is otherwise illegal. Emerging research also highlights the overlap between cryptocurrency speculation and gambling harm.

Some investors demonstrate behaviours commonly associated with problem gambling, including compulsive trading and chasing losses. Crypto casinos therefore, present a double danger. They enable people to gamble on high-risk online betting products using currencies that are themselves highly volatile.

Despite this, consumer protection standards among crypto casinos can be weaker than in conventional online gambling. Research has found that many crypto casinos offer limited links to gambling harm support, and some offer no safer gambling measures at all.

Promotional campaigns across social media and high-profile sports sponsorships can help normalise these platforms. This creates a veneer of legitimacy while exposing fans, particularly young and vulnerable groups, to products that are largely unregulated, easily accessible and associated with an elevated risk of harm.

As Dr Philip Newall of the University of Bristol has noted, crypto gambling websites sit outside some current online gambling policy responses, even while their logos appear in English football sponsorship spaces. This is a reminder that regulation has not always kept pace with commercial adoption.

These sponsorships may undermine the Premier League’s commitment to ethical commercial partnerships. They can also have a profound impact on fans. By embedding unregulated or high-risk gambling-style products within football culture, clubs may expose supporters to financial harm.

Dame Caroline Dinenage has also warned that clubs may be promoting volatile crypto asset schemes to extract additional money from loyal supporters, often with promises of privileges and perks that fail to materialise.

What should UK Clubs Be Doing Now?

The above begs the question of what should football clubs be doing to protect their fans to avoid repeating the gambling sponsorship fiasco and to enforce a new level of scrutiny and transparency in the crypto era.

Enforce Stricter Vetting of Crypto Sponsors

Football clubs should adopt far more rigorous vetting processes when considering crypto-based sponsors, ensuring that any partnership is grounded in transparency, financial stability, and regulatory compliance. This means conducting thorough due diligence before any contract is signed; verifying the company’s finances; confirming regulatory status and filings in each jurisdiction of operation; and mapping out the sponsor’s corporate footprint to identify shell structures or unclear beneficial ownership. Clubs should require full disclosure of ultimate beneficial owners and satisfactory KYC checks for all controlling stakeholders, alongside litigation and enforcement history reviews across global sanctions and regulatory databases.

To safeguard the club’s reputation, sponsorship contracts should include protective clauses, such as making the deal conditional on the delivery of verified solvency documents and introducing automatic response measures if the sponsor becomes subject to regulatory action, including the immediate removal of branding and a remediation plan funded by the sponsor.

Without these protections, clubs risk aligning themselves with entities whose operations may be unstable, non-compliant, or akin to high-risk gambling models, as highlighted by research from Play the Game. Standardising such vetting across the Premier League would ensure a consistent baseline of trust, building on lessons from clubs that have already been forced to withdraw from problematic sponsorships as referenced earlier in this article.

Include Saving Exit Clauses

Football clubs should also ensure that sponsorship agreements with crypto firms contain strong, reputation-saving exit clauses, so they are not trapped when a partner collapses or becomes embroiled in regulatory trouble, as seen after the FTX crash in 2022, which left more millions of pounds worth of branding deals stranded. Contracts should include automatic termination triggers if the sponsor faces insolvency or enforcement action, alongside indemnity provisions that secure financial compensation for reputational harm.

Clubs should also negotiate a delisting clause that requires the sponsor to remove branding from kits, stadium assets, and digital channels in the event of insolvency or enforcement action. Additional protections such as clauses allowing early removal of branding without penalty, requirements for sponsors to fund buybacks of affected merchandise, and conditions ensuring that any company must pass due diligence tests give clubs the legal and financial flexibility to act quickly and decisively. These safeguards ensure that when a sponsor’s legitimacy deteriorates, the club’s identity, commercial value, and public trust remain protected.

Align With FCA Consumer Protection Guidance

Finally, football clubs should align their crypto sponsorship activities with the FCA’s emerging consumer protection standards, even where the asset or service is technically unregulated.

The guiding principle here is the FCA’s Consumer Duty requirement to avoid foreseeable harm, meaning promotional materials must be fair, balanced, and never misleading. Clubs should integrate clear, prominent risk warnings into all fan facing campaigns and monitor updates to the UK Cryptoasset Financial Promotions Regime, which since October 2023 has mandated warnings such as “Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all your money.”

Even when tokens fall outside the FCA’s formal perimeter, the direction of travel in regulation is towards stronger consumer safeguards, reduced incentivisation, and greater clarity. Adopting these standards proactively, such as adding FCA-style risk banners to all marketing, appointing an internal compliance lead to review promotions, rejecting gambling-like incentive schemes such as bonus codes and partnering only with firms that meet UK level AML and onboarding requirements would not only protect supporters but also insulate clubs from regulatory scrutiny and reputational backlash.

In practice, this means treating the FCA’s good practice checklist as the baseline for any crypto related activation or branded content, reinforcing trust at a time when fan welfare and commercial integrity are under increasing public and regulatory focus.

Closing Thoughts

Crypto sponsorships may provide immediate financial relief and global exposure, but reputational damage can outlast any season. Clubs that rush into deals for quick profit risk being remembered not for innovation, but for negligence.

The rise of blockchain in sport does not need to mirror the mistakes of gambling sponsorships. It can evolve responsibly, but only on the premise that clubs act now to build governance, accountability, and ethical clarity into every agreement.

If you believe you have been a victim of a scam, contact us at Wealth Recovery Solicitors for a free consultation with our experienced team to determine the most effective route to recovering your funds.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is sports-washing in football?

Sports-washing in football happens when a brand, industry, state or organisation uses the popularity of football to improve its public image. It can involve sponsorships, partnerships, shirt branding, stadium naming rights or fan-focused campaigns. The concern is that the emotional power of football can make controversial or high-risk organisations appear more trusted than they really are.

Why are crypto firms sponsoring UK sports teams?

Crypto firms sponsor UK sports teams because sport offers massive visibility, loyal audiences and global reach. A partnership with a well-known club can help a crypto brand appear more mainstream and credible. For clubs, crypto sponsorships can provide new revenue at a time when other sponsorship categories, such as gambling, face tighter scrutiny.

How did crypto replace gambling sponsorship in the Premier League?

Crypto has not fully replaced gambling sponsorship, but it has moved into the commercial space left by increasing restrictions on gambling advertising. As the Premier League moves towards a front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship ban from the 2026/27 season, clubs are seeking alternative revenue streams. Crypto firms have used this moment to secure partnerships, shirt exposure and fan-facing activations.

Are crypto sponsorships regulated in the UK?

Crypto sponsorships may fall under different rules depending on the product being promoted. Some cryptoasset promotions are subject to the UK Cryptoasset Financial Promotions Regime and FCA expectations around risk warnings. However, not every token, platform or sponsorship activation will fall neatly within the same regulatory framework. This creates a risk that fans may see crypto branding without fully understanding the protections, or lack of protections, that apply.

Can a club’s crypto promotion be misleading?

Yes, a crypto promotion can be misleading if it presents a product as safer, more secure or more rewarding than it really is. It may also be misleading if risk warnings are unclear, hidden or missing. Fans should not assume that a club partnership means the crypto product has been independently verified or is suitable for them.

What risks do fans face from crypto sponsorships?

Fans may face risks including financial loss, exposure to volatile assets, gambling-style incentives and misleading promises of rewards or access. They may also be encouraged to buy tokens, NFTs or crypto products they do not fully understand. Young fans and vulnerable supporters may be particularly exposed when promotions are embedded in football culture.

Is sports-washing the same as money laundering?

No, sports-washing and money laundering are not the same. Sports-washing is about improving reputation or public perception through sport. Money laundering is the process of concealing the origins of criminally obtained money so that it appears legitimate. However, both can involve attempts to use respectable institutions or commercial activity to create a sense of legitimacy.

What should I do if I lost money after a crypto promotion?

If you lost money after engaging with a crypto promotion, sponsorship, token scheme or investment platform, stop sending money immediately. Gather evidence, including screenshots, transaction records, wallet addresses, emails, messages and promotional materials. You should report the matter to Action Fraud and seek advice from a regulated professional.