Key Points
- Bristol reckons the shirt ban is to blame for a 10.5% fall in live match messages outside the usual betting ads that lead into matches, compared to those seen from 2023 to 2025.
- Boards around the pitch were still showing 72% of all live match messages, while the branding on players’ sleeves and training kits had somehow managed to rise by a staggering 362%, a nice piece of marketing work whoever sorted that out.
- And the front-of-shirt branding the bit everyone was so keen to get rid of, increased by 8% to £444m, even as the overall betting sponsorship across the league went down by a pretty substantial £92m.
Clean Shirts, Very Dirty Screens
Premier League shirts looked a lot cleaner in August because of the new betting ban but if you were watching the broadcasts, you’d never have known. Bristol researchers took a look at the live match broadcasts on Sky Sports, along with Sky Sports News, talkSPORT radio and the social feeds of ten betting brands. They spotted a total of 15,571 gambling messages across all those channels.
So that’s 41% more than the 11,000 or so they saw in 2023 but not quite as bad as the 29,000 they counted in 2024 or the 27,400 in 2025.
And guess what? The live coverage of seven top-flight matches was responsible for 11,205 of those messages and the betting ads were on screen for a whopping five hours and 16 minutes in total. To put that into perspective, that’s 19% of the 27 hours of match footage they looked at. One match that was a bit of an exception to the rule was Newcastle United against Liverpool where a staggering 2,702 messages and branding were visible for nearly 40% of the whole broadcast.
Lead Ins Not Shirts Drove Most of the Fall
Now, the big question is did the shirt ban actually work? Well, it all depends on which of two rather different sets of numbers you believe. Compared to the average of the past three years, the live match messages were down by 36% from 17,500 to 11,200. Most of that drop came from the sponsorship ads before the match itself, which plummeted 88% from 5,800 to 700.
The bit that’s left out of that calculation is the bit that was actually affected by the new rules and that fell by just 10.5%. Researchers are being careful with their language here, by the way, describing it as “associated with” the restriction which is a bit of a long way from saying it’s definitely because of it.
And in all honesty, the front of shirt logos only made up about 10% of the messages on live broadcasts in the first place, so getting rid of them made very little difference either way. Dr Raffaello Rossi from Bristol has been quoted in the SBC News saying that these kinds of results are exactly why the shirt ban can’t be seen as a success for self-regulation.
Pitchside Boards Still Own the Picture
Pitchside boards delivered a real punch with a massive 6,491 messages, a 6.4% increase on the 3-year average of 6,101. But when you look at boards and static boards combined it’s clear that pitchside advertising is gobbling up the lion’s share 72.06% of all matched counts. Sleeves and training kits may have made a bit of a splash, with messages up 362.7% from 121.7 to 563. But let’s not kid ourselves, 563 is a tiny number compared to the 8,000 messages that flashed up on the boards.
Timing didn’t help all that much either. A whopping 7,816 messages or 69.75% of the total, showed up during whistle-to-whistle periods. Yet the industry’s much-touted “whistle-to-whistle pledge” only covers TV adverts and not the boards flashing behind the players. And even though the number of messages dropped between whistles the share of messages actually rose from 60.8% in 2025.
In the advertising stakes, three names Betway, Bet365 and Betano dominated with 65.18% of all live messages. Four of the 27 brands weren’t even licensed to advertise in the UK yet they still managed to clock up 8.46% of messages.
Away from the UK, broadcasts look a lot quieter and the comparisons are pretty stark. Over 26 games from 2023 to 2026, Premier League coverage clocked up an average of 2,449 messages per game. For nine Bundesliga games in 2025, that number was 1,677 messages, while NBA and NHL coverage in the US and Canada managed a paltry 483 and 505 messages respectively. The samples differ in size and year but the gap between them is pretty hard to ignore.
Social Feeds Reach Young Adults Millions of Times
When it comes to socials, researchers flagged up to 1,023 paid gambling adverts on Facebook and Instagram, which clocked up a total UK reach of 153.2 million. But this is a big number, and the same account can be counted multiple times across different adverts. Young adults aged 18 to 24 accounted for 16.6 million of those reach instances, that’s 10.9% of the total.
When it comes to organic posts, there’s a different worry altogether. 74% of the 499 posts that were examined were classed as “content marketing”. And of those content marketing posts, a staggering 93% weren’t even clearly identifiable as adverts.
A Rule Born in 2023, Tested by the Money
Back in April 2023, Premier League clubs agreed to ditch gambling sponsorships from the front of matchday shirts. But sleeves and pitchside boards were left untouched, and it wasn’t until the 2026/27 season that the rule actually came into effect. At the time of that agreement, eight top-flight clubs were carrying betting brands on their shirt fronts.
And in each of the two seasons before the ban, that number had climbed to eleven.
Fast forward to April 7th 2026 and iGB were reporting that clubs were facing an expected shortfall of £80m, quoting a Guardian investigation. By August, Yogonet were reporting that eight of those clubs had to find new sponsors for 2026/27.
By September, though, the shirt front itself looked anything but broken. Ampere Analysis reckoned front of shirt revenue was up to £444m, an 8% increase on the previous season. Eight clubs swapped gambling deals worth £67m for new sponsorships worth £75m.
The wider betting pot, on the other hand, took a serious hit falling from £155m to £63m across all Premier League assets. And guess what? Gambling brands now account for 57% of training kit sponsorship spending up from 34% the season before. Their share of sleeve spending jumped from 3% to 20%.
Westminster Looks Beyond the Shirt And is Frustrated at How Little That’s Done
On 21st October, Rossi took the study’s findings to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Gambling Reform and the reaction was telling. Its co-chair, Sir Iain Duncan Smith flatly said the front-of-shirt restriction had made barely a dent in the issue. He took it further, saying that the voluntary approach to gambling advertising in football has simply failed to deliver. Even the project’s patrons, England goalkeeper Peter Shilton and his wife Steph, welcomed the shirt front restriction but still felt that there was so much more that needed doing to keep young people safe from all this advertising.
All the government has managed so far is to aim at a very narrow bit of the market. The DCMS had a consultation on unlicensed sponsorship running from 15th July to 9th September 2026 but on the 22nd October, there was still no sign of the government’s response. The proposal it made is to ban sponsorship and advertising by unlicensed operators, including in sport. But simple maths makes it pretty clear that this would hardly make a dent as it leaves 91.54% of all live messages untouched.
A Lords Liaison Committee follow-up report, published on 17th September 2026, had a far more ambitious idea that the best long-term solution is to ban all gambling advertising. And it backed this up with a recommendation to remove it from not just sports kits but training kits too and essentially from anywhere near sports grounds.
What Counts May Not Tell the Whole Story?
The message counts: we’ve been talking about measuring how visible things are, not whether they are actually doing any harm. And this method has got a few quirks that people need to know about. Each identical logo in a shot counts as a separate message, so one image with five matching boards would be counted as five messages. And the Great Britain gambling survey this year found that 2.4% of adults are having problems with their gambling that’s the same rate as over the past three years. But there’s no link made between the message counts and that rate.
The Shirt Ban: More Symbol than Substance
Our view is pretty blunt and I reckon a lot of people won’t agree with it but we think that the shirt ban was more about winning a PR battle than actually doing something about it. We think a rule that only covers a tenth of live messages can’t possibly deliver much of an impact. Those pitchside boards, which in 2023 were untouched at 72.06% and are still untouched today, aren’t covered at all.
The self-regulation lot can be pretty smug and we should give them credit where it’s due. A 35.9% drop in live match messages is real, whatever caused it. But most of that came from lead-ins, which, as luck would have it, the shirt rules never applied to. The money argument, which was supposed to be a big deal, has lost some of its bite. Clubs were told there would be an £80m hole but the front of shirt revenue still climbed to £444m. We know that the wider betting pot did fall by £92m and that some clubs did manage to replace it but still the shirt front was much easier to sell than the warnings suggested.
As for what’s next on the agenda my bet is that training kits will be the next battleground. And that’s because gambling brands are already snapping up 57% of the spend, and the Lords committee has already flagged training kits as an area of concern.
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