Read on Twitter
Exclusive: I've spent months investigating how secretive Asian gambling companies came to dominate Premier League football, spending millions to advertise to TV viewers in China... where gambling firms are strictly illegal. https://theathletic.com/2361984/2021/02/03/gambling-premier-league-shirt-sponsors-investigation?source=emp-shared-article
If you've watched *any* English football in recent years you'll have noticed lots of adverts for gambling companies. Some of these will be familiar. But what is not widely understood is that lots are not targeting a UK audience at all...
They're basically using English football as a billboard to advertise to the Chinese TV audience, using a complex chain of offshore companies, which are opaque and secretive, and little is known about where they're based or their sources of funding.
Getting to the bottom of this took dozens and dozens of conversations with people in the UK, China, The Philippines...
Hard not to conclude that clubs have very little idea about companies on their shirts or on billboards around their grounds.
Hard not to conclude that clubs have very little idea about companies on their shirts or on billboards around their grounds.
The whole system is made possible by the UK Gambling Commission's "white label" system, which gives companies access to the UK market, despite nobody in the UK having any idea about them.
The upcoming UK gambling review will look at this, and shirt sponsorship
The upcoming UK gambling review will look at this, and shirt sponsorship
One of the many absurd details in this... in 2019 Wolves and Newcastle played a friendly in China... but had to change their shirts, because they're sponsored by gambling companies, with the logos written in Chinese. In China that is very illegal!
Although many of these companies have functioning UK websites, they're all run by a couple of companies in places like the Isle of Man and Malta, so look pretty much identical. The UK websites aren't the real business - that's going on in Asia.
It also comes as the Gambling Commission has admitted to “concern” that some white-label websites may not have effective anti-money-laundering controls or carry out “sufficient due diligence” on websites to ensure there are no “links to criminal activity”.
Oh another absurd detail. Here's Burnley v Huddersfield in 2019. Neither Laba360 nor OPE Sports have a functioning website any more, and there's absolutely no trace of where they went.
https://www.laba360.co.uk/
https://www.opesports.co.uk/
https://www.laba360.co.uk/
https://www.opesports.co.uk/
jj
Please do share and read the whole thing if you can, this is by far the most work I've ever put into anything and I was pretty shocked by what I found out...
I'm especially indebted to Dr James Noyes of @SMFthinktank who wrote this report https://www.smf.co.uk/publications/gambling-review-reform/
I'm especially indebted to Dr James Noyes of @SMFthinktank who wrote this report https://www.smf.co.uk/publications/gambling-review-reform/
Thanks to everyone who spoke to me for this - especially those who took a risk in doing so.
Also to @lmwilliamson7 @AlexKayJelski @lukedbrown for putting up with a lot of conversations about a very complex topic, and for being patient enough to want get to the bottom of this!
Also to @lmwilliamson7 @AlexKayJelski @lukedbrown for putting up with a lot of conversations about a very complex topic, and for being patient enough to want get to the bottom of this!
These sites are constantly emerging and vanishing with different URLs and different names, flipping between English, Chinese, and other Asian languages... makes it very hard to find out where they are or who's running them https://twitter.com/lawyh1506/status/1356943821620219907
