The Confusing Politics of Jersey Sponsorships | OneFootball

The rules and regulations around football kit sponsors continuously evolve, especially around industries of vice like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. But where is the moral line drawn on what is “acceptable” to plaster across the front of a jersey?

Soccer jerseys (or football kits, depending on your persuasion) are a collector’s dream. There are thousands of shirts representing clubs the world over, national team shirts, and even limited edition drops for fans to drool over and spend far too much money on.

I’ve got a collection of over 60 kits, each with its own unique story and memories attached. Very much in vogue, plenty of digital ink has been spilled about the concept of the soccer jersey as a fashion object. Retro kits have never been more in, and there’s even been a moniker given to the combination of loose retro shirts, faded jeans, and low-top sneakers: Bloke Core. That’s basically how I dressed from 2005 until I got married, but nobody gave me any forward-thinking fashion credit.

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But soccer jerseys aren’t just sartorial time capsules. They act as a microcosm of the time and place, of the club for which they were produced, for the players that wore them and, through the sponsors, the businesses that held sway and influence in that era. What’s more: soccer jerseys are political.

The “shut up and dribble” crowd insist on separating sports and politics. They’d love nothing more than to throw up a psychological Berlin Wall between the halcyon world of grown adults chasing around a ball and the far ickier discussions of who exactly deserves human rights, and when.

We all know that this is impossible, that in the absence of Lumon Industries’ technological advancements we can’t expect human beings to stop being, well, human beings. The peculiar political moment at which we find ourselves only highlights the hazy mixing of sports, politics, and business that frequently congeals into a physical object in the form of soccer jerseys.

The very shirts that soccer clubs and big businesses create for both players and the masses clue us in to what is culturally and politically acceptable at any given time, in any given country. The constant action and lack of commercial breaks in soccer require that clubs sell advertising space on the players themselves, an idea that up until a few years ago would’ve seemed extraterrestrial to your average American sports enjoyer.

Shirt sponsorships now account for a massive percentage of club revenues, with Spanish powerhouse Real Madrid reportedly being paid a whopping $80 million per year via their agreement with Emirates Airlines. That deal alone is worth nearly half of what the club spent in the recent summer transfer window.

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This grim economic reality can lead to some less-than-savory partnerships in the pursuit of profit. Let’s take, for instance Austria Wien, which, starting in 1977, had a nearly 30-year partnership with cigarette company Austria Tabak. The club sported an advertisement for the company’s flagship product, Memphis Cigarette, across the front of its kits, and even had Memphis as part of its name until 2004, when legislation banned tobacco companies from sponsoring football clubs.

The entire soccer leagues of Indonesia and Colombia were sponsored by tobacco products between the late ’80s and early ’90s as well.

Beer and alcohol sponsored shirts were so prevalent that they even inspired an article ranking the best ones on this very website. Famous clubs from Boca Juniors to Celtic and Everton sported ads for libations until, slowly but surely, leagues around the world worked to prohibit them, either through national laws or league policy.

Major League Soccer, in something of a heel-turn, actually loosened rules for shirt sponsors in 2019, allowing for alcoholic spirits and sports betting companies to be advertised on shirt fronts and sleeves. Various MLS teams have sported alcohol-based sleeve patches, but none have taken the leap and gone with a front-of-the-shirt alcohol sponsor, given that, by rule, any shirt produced for youth fans can’t hawk illicit products.

But while alcohol was de rigueur amongst sponsors in previous eras of football kits, today’s great modern battleground features an industry so ubiquitous we see it advertised during all manner of sports games, on the sides of public buses, and even on children’s mobile apps: sports betting.

After the 2018 United States Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. The National Collegiate Athletic Association paved the way for legalized sports gambling across the U.S., MLS was quick to line up a sponsorship deal with MGM Casinos. In the summer of 2019, the league moved to allow betting companies to advertise on jerseys, albeit with the same caveats as alcohol sponsorships.

I can’t be alone in feeling immense frustration with encountering sports betting in all facets of life. If the industry feels unsavory, it’s because it is. There aren’t many businesses wherein being a repeat customer is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 5. Gambling companies have reportedly resorted to some over-the-top and grimy tactics to get regular folks addicted to their platforms and pissing away their life savings on parlays that have less of a chance of hitting than Luis Suarez staying controversy-free over a full season.

Only the Seattle Sounders have so far embraced sports betting as a shirt sponsor, wearing the logo of the Emerald Queen Casino on the sleeve of their home kits. Being morally outraged at this is not so straightforward, however, as this casino is owned and operated by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, who reportedly use casino revenue to provide social services and material support for tribe members.

One sleeve out of all 30 team jerseys across the league doesn’t seem like that much visibility, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see more and more gambling sponsors pop up on MLS shirts in the coming years as the business explodes across the country.

The major question raised by this mixture of professional sports and industries of vice is: Precisely when are we going to view these sponsorships in the same light as we view the Austrian cigarette shirt sponsorships of the 1980s? It’s obvious that sports betting is a pernicious, life-destroying habit for more than a small handful of people, many of whom would otherwise be considered responsible members of society.

Perhaps it’s the current juncture of American culture where everything has to be monetized and enshittified. There seems to be an ever-shrinking piece of the pie to be shared among us regular people, that Major League Soccer’s opening the door to betting advertisers feels simply grimy. Alcohol can ruin lives. We all understand this, academically. However, a Carling logo slapped on a Celtic jersey never felt so sinister, since you never really got the impression that Carling’s ultimate goal was world domination.

Europe, as in many arenas, seems to be ahead of North America in recognizing the stickiness of this situation. The English Premier League, held in high esteem by American soccer fans as the shining example of how to run a competition, has run in the other direction away from gambling sponsorships on shirt-fronts. In April of 2023, Premier League clubs voted to voluntarily eliminate gambling sponsorships from their shirts by the 2026-27 season.

La Liga demanded that all clubs abandon their sports betting sponsorships by the year 2021. The German Bundesliga technically allows betting companies to advertise on shirts, but clubs have been disincentivized from doing so.

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Off-site sports gambling has been legal in the United Kingdom since 1960, so there remains the argument that enough time has passed to reveal the full societal effects of this kind of state-sanctioned debauchery. To American fans like me beginning to watch the Premier League in the ’90s, it felt like such a stark contrast to the world of American sports that companies like Paddy Power were so intimately involved in the culture of English soccer.

It seems that cooler heads have come around to the idea that, despite the fact that betting companies shell out in the range of $150 million per year to sponsor Premier League shirts, the lens of history will look upon this practice as nothing but a grubby cash grab, albeit one that lasted for decades.

When it comes to discussions of morality, Major League Soccer will be a victim of its inferiority complex. From a business perspective, the league is stable, modestly profitable, and capable of attracting talent that gets the soccer-curious fan jazzed. But when you are tirelessly compared to European money-machine behemoths like the Premier League, La Liga, and the Bundesliga, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling well short of whatever unrealistic goal Don Garber proposed a decade ago.

So MLS will go with the flow just like all other North American sports, not inclined to look the gift horse of sports betting money in the mouth. More money means more profit means more investors means more expansion means more fees…you get the point.

Of course my pearl-clutching over shirt advertising might end up being for naught. It’s perfectly feasible that MLS clubs will reflexively turn their noses up at gambling sponsorships, a la Bundesliga clubs, and at least the fronts of our silly little replica shirts will be a solitary safe-haven against the ubiquity of betting ads.

On the other hand, what is MLS other than a giant, single-entity business? The point of business is to make money. Like a zombie in a George Romero movie, the single-minded pursuit of “braaaaains” precludes worrying about pesky little things like the long, bending moral arc of the universe. It’s not like there aren’t other problematic businesses slapped on the fronts of MLS jerseys.

Heck, when you really think about it, my own team, the New York Red Bulls, amounts to nothing more than a marketing scheme for an Austrian energy drink conglomerate that produces products which, if some medical advice is to be believed, should never be consumed by anyone under any circumstances.

Financial companies are guilty of their share of atrocities in recent years, yet the likes of CF Montreal, Charlotte FC, LAFC, Nashville SC, and Toronto FC all advertise banking conglomerates on their shirts.

The underhanded and unsavory practices of private health insurance companies has been pushed to the fore of our national dialogue since the 2024 murder of a United Healthcare executive, and while that behavior certainly can’t be justified, many people’s eyes have been opened to the nefariousness of that industry.

The Los Angeles Galaxy have had nutrition “company” Herbalife as their shirt sponsor since 2007. That company is so likely a pyramid scheme that their official website has under the “Frequently Asked Questions” page a vehement denial that they are a pyramid scheme. NYCFC is a farm team owned by a Middle Eastern oil state.

Even so-called “green” or morally conscious sponsors have a dark side. Just look at the ongoing debacle with the Los Angeles Clippers and now-bankrupt green bank Aspiration.

The point is, none of us practice Santería (unless you do) and none of us have a crystal ball. We have only vague guesses as to which of these sponsorships is going to look the worst through the lens of history. And will anyone care? It’s got to be hard for corporate types to weigh the promise of hundreds of millions in revenue with the notion that you might be ruining someone’s life by pushing them toward gambling addiction. Capitalism, especially in the world of professional sports, has taught us that all is fair in the pursuit of winning.

Further muddying the waters is the intimately personal nature of the game of soccer. We love our heroes and hate our villains with a vehemence generally reserved for warfare or politics. Grown adult men like me will wear the name of another grown man on our backs just because they’re good at scoring goals for our clubs. I don’t wear a Red Bulls shirt because I like to drink Red Bull, but because my youthful affinity for Thierry Henry tricked me into acting as a walking billboard for roughly 40 days out of the year. (Titi is a gateway drug.)

What remains to be seen is whether MLS will follow corporate culture to plumb the depths of acceptability, or if idolatry and imitation of European leagues will steer them in a less boorish direction. One thing is for sure: when MLS is 50 or 100 years old, we can look forward to this very website doing a listicle about “The 10 Ten Worst MLS Shirt Sponsors of All Time.”