Rights holders want to know which categories to prioritise when selling sponsorship, so one angle is to focus on categories they’re most likely to do a deal with. In this edition, we look at sponsorship deals among the Top 5 EU soccer leagues.

There are two ways of looking at ‘most likely’, so we analysed over 4,100 sponsorship deals since the start of 2023 to understand which categories are most likely to sponsor teams in the Bundesliga (Germany), LaLiga (Spain), Ligue 1 (France), the Premier League (England) and Serie A (Italy) versus any other type of rights holder.

A bit of maths

Firstly, ‘most likely’ can simply mean volume, i.e. which categories have done the most ‘T5EUSL’ deals. In this case, Gambling brands lead the way at 8.2% of deals. However, Gambling brands also do a lot of deals in other fields such as Equestrian, Cricket, Motorsport and Basketball. This means there’s a lot of competition successfully fighting for Gambling brand’s budgets.

So, the idea is to focus attention where there is less competition and this is where the second meaning of ‘most likely’ comes in: how likely is a category to do a deal in my field (in this case, the T5EUSL) compared to that category doing a deal in any other field?

This is called over-indexing, propensity or probability and is normally measured by a number (not a percentage). In this scenario, Crypto/Blockchain brands lead the way being 4.82x more likely to do T5EUSL sponsorship deals versus with any other rights holder.

This is because the category accounts for 4.25% of T5EUSL-related deals compared to just 0.88% of all other deals (4.25 divided by 0.88 = 4.82).

In other words, although Crypto/Blockchain brands do less T5EUSL sponsorship deals than Gambling brands, they are the most likely to choose a T5EUSL entity compared to any other type of rights holder. So, the level of competition (or noise) for a T5EUSL rights holder when approaching this category is much less.

Going back to Gambling, its over-indexing figure is 1.29x as Gambling brands account for 6.4% of T5EUSL deals versus 4.5% of all other deals. So this only makes Gambling brands the 14th most likely category to choose T5EUSL vs. any other rights holder.

What’s driving Crypto/Blockchain deals?

Crypto/Blockchain’s activity in the Top 5 EU soccer leagues has been driven by Serie A, namely Juventus doing three deals in the category – Socios.com (fan tokens), Zondacrypto and Bitget – along with AC Milan’s deal with BitMEX (all exchanges) and Lazio’s with blockchain trading firm Dunamu. Three deals have been done in the Premier League – Socios with Tottenham Hotspur, OKX with Manchester City and BingX with Chelsea (both the latter being exchanges).

Within this, crypto deals are much more concentrated around the Champions League teams (the elite teams within these leagues) due to the greater need to establish global brand awareness, legitimacy and trust among consumers.