Betting brands are off Premier League shirts. Enterprise software moved in

Premier League clubs are playing this season without gambling brands on the front of matchday shirts, forcing eight of the 20 to find new partners at once. Fulham’s went to ClickHouse, an American data infrastructure company valued at $15bn.

The most valuable advertising space in world sport has changed hands, and some of it went to a database company. ClickHouse has replaced the betting firm SBOTOP on the front of Fulham’s shirt for the new season.

The reason is a rule rather than a bidding war. A voluntary Premier League restriction on gambling front-of-shirt sponsorship takes effect this season, which forced eight of the league’s 20 clubs to find new partners simultaneously.

That timing changed the terms. “If there’s more inventory coming on the market at the same time, it’s a buyer’s market,” said Tanya Bragin, ClickHouse’s vice president of product and marketing.

It did not make it cheap. Bragin says the opportunities the company looked at were still competitive, which is what happens when demand for the world’s most watched league does not fall.

Fulham was a deliberate choice rather than the best available. “Top teams are obviously going to be a much bigger investment for us to sponsor them,” Bragin said. “Until maybe we’re a public company, I was like, you know, maybe mid-table would be ideal in terms of price range.”

The buyer is not small. ClickHouse reached $250mn of annualised revenue in May, roughly triple a year earlier, and raised $400mn at a $15bn valuation in January, in a funding environment where megadeals dominate everything else.

London mattered as much as the television audience. Bragin cites hospitality as a priority, which is a candid way of saying the shirt is partly a room in which to entertain enterprise customers.

The substitutions elsewhere follow the same logic. Everton replaced Stake with the financial services firm CMC Markets, and Brentford swapped Hollywoodbets for the recruitment platform Indeed.

What makes this notable is who is doing the spending. Business software has spent several years telling itself that growth without marketing is the mark of a good company, and here is one buying the most watched inventory in sport before it lists.

The gambling money has not left the game. Betting brands can still appear on sleeves and training kit, Manchester United’s training deal with Betway is reported at up to £20mn a year, and clubs in the four divisions below are not covered by the restriction at all.

So the restriction moved the advertising rather than removing it. What changed is that European football audiences now see American data infrastructure brands where the bookmakers used to be.