Everton announce club-record sponsorship deal with Stake.com, finance expert reacts
Finance expert Kieran Maguire has reacted to the announcement from Everton Thursday [9 June] that they had agreed a club-record new shirt sponsor.
Stake.com, an online casino, are the Toffees’ new main partner and will appear on the front of both the men’s and women’s team’s shirts in what the club have called “the highest value front-of-shirt deal in the Club’s 144-year history”.
They had previously cut short their agreement with Cazoo by activating a break clause, bringing it to a close after two years – at the end of June – in search of a more lucrative deal, and this one is believed to be worth millions of pounds more [Liverpool Echo].
But the club were previously sponsored by another betting company, Sport Pesa, and chose to move away from that partnership which Maguire focused on this in his reaction.
He wrote on his personal Twitter account in reaction to the news: “Everton, who terminated their sponsor arrangement with a gambling company two years ago saying “in an ideal world” they would want a “different type of sponsor” replace Cazoo deal with a gambling company sponsor”.
He accompanied it with a face-palm emoji.
Desperate times
Shortly before terminating the Sport Pesa agreement, Denise Barret-Baxendale had said as much, but it appears that following a cumulative set of calamitous circumstances that viewpoint has gone out of the window.
Wild spending under Farhad Moshiri has reached a head as, with little to show for it, the club are now forced to operate on a much-reduced budget while working in conjunction with the Premier League.
Huge losses have been accrued over recent years which, although affected by Covid-19 and other expenditures such as the Bramley-Moore Dock stadium development, are potentially subject to legal challenge from Leeds and Burnley.
The club almost got relegated from the Premier League under these conditions, and along the way lost its previous main sponsor USM after the club needed to hastily cut ties with Alisher Usmanov following the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, due to his links to Vladimir Putin.
The focus on the major grip that the betting industry has on football is also coming under increasing scrutiny.
While this announcement may be a positive boost financially for a club that badly needs it now, it may be storing up trouble down the line.
It’s a fairly bad look of rowing back on your own words and attaching the club’s name to the gambling industry again as a response to needing to detach it from a man sanctioned over a military invasion.
But if pressure to legislate against such sponsors in football leads to action any time soon the club could again be left scrambling to find replacement revenue.
It is a sign of the mess the club has been led into under its current leadership that such a move has been necessary, and in itself doesn’t suggest a massive amount of self-reflection.
In other Everton news, a vital transfer is expected to be complete by Friday [10 June].
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