The football sponsors you might not want on your shirt (part one)
A look at some of the most questionable sponsorship deals this season
The Premier League kicked off this weekend. For years, British and international football clubs have struck sponsorship deals with companies ranging from airlines to property developers and even tractor firms. But no partnerships have drawn as much scrutiny—or controversy—as those involving crypto and gambling firms.
This season, more than half of the teams in the Premier League have gambling sponsors. And while some of them may be household names in the UK, others have long baffled fans as to what they actually are.
In particular, many of the strangest platforms were previously licensed in the UK by The Gambling Platform, better known as TGP. A white-label gambling provider once registered in the Isle of Man, TGP spent years helping questionable Asian betting sites enter the UK market and secure high-profile sponsorships with clubs including Chelsea and Manchester City.
Earlier this year, TGP surrendered its license after UK regulators ordered it to pay a £3.3 million penalty and overhaul its compliance systems. The Gambling Commission found the company had failed to properly vet partners and had breached anti-money laundering rules.
During its existence, TGP was reticent about sharing information about who ran it. However, a 2014 statement from a business partner linked TGP to SunCity Group, a Macau gambling syndicate once run by Alvin Chau. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) later confirmed the connection, reporting in 2024 that “Chau and Suncity appear to have controlled The Gaming Platform (TGP) Europe and Asia, as indicated by several documented connections between the entities.”
Chau is now serving an 18-year prison sentence after being convicted on more than 100 charges, including organized crime, illegal gaming and facilitating illicit bets worth an estimated £85.7 billion. SunCity was also identified in a Philippines court as laundering millions of dollars for North Korea’s Lazarus Group following the Bangladesh Bank heist in 2016. The UNODC described SunCity as having “vast connections to some of the region’s most prolific drug trafficking and cyber-enabled fraud networks.”
In May, the Gambling Commission said it had written to UK football clubs with ties to TGP-linked companies—including AFC Bournemouth, Fulham, Newcastle United, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Burnley—“warning of the risks of promoting unlicensed gambling websites.” Those warnings seem to have had limited impact. While some branding has been removed or restricted on their websites for UK audiences in some cases, many clubs continue their partnerships, featuring the firms prominently on players’ kits.
In this series, Scamurai will look at the strange crypto and casino companies sponsoring Premier League and other British football teams. Many of the companies looked at engendered questions about who ultimately controls these platforms, how they are funding multi-million-pound deals that far exceed market valuations, and—most concerning—are they even functioning operations at all?
Later parts of the series will expand the scope to other platforms not directly tied to TGP but still raising serious doubts about the due diligence clubs perform when choosing sponsors.
There is, however, one modest silver lining. In April, Premier League clubs voted to voluntarily ban front-of-shirt betting sponsors starting in the 2026-27 season. It’s a temporary one-year reprieve but at least for a while these brands will not be able to enjoy such prominent exposure on English football’s biggest stage.
BJ88
AFC Bournemouth’s front-of-shirt sponsor this season remains BJ88, which signed an £8 million deal with the club in July 2024—nearly triple the £2.8 million valuation for such a sponsorship estimated by industry outlet The Sponsor.
BJ88, which claims to have been founded in 2021, was described in a press release at the time as “one of the fastest growing trusted brands in Asia” and “a reputed brand based in the Philippines,” citing operating licenses from Philippine regulator PAGCOR. Beyond Bournemouth, it has also sponsored Bologna FC in Italy and a couple of cricket teams.
The brand, however, has been flagged by the UK Gambling Commission as one of several problematic TGP-linked sponsors. Despite that, Bournemouth has kept the partnership in place.
Following the signing of the deal, reports surfaced that BJ88 had run cockfighting competitions, a bloodsport popular in parts of Southeast Asia.
BJ88’s UK-targeted website appears never to have properly launched. The last archived version from September 13, 2024, showed only a “coming soon” page before the site went offline. In Asia, its operations are equally opaque. Numerous websites with near-identical domains appear to be clones, and Google DMCA takedown requests filed under BJ88’s name suggest some may be scams run by unaffiliated actors.
The company’s main domain now redirects to another platform, CitiNow, which carries some BJ88 branding and advertises the Bournemouth sponsorship. Like BJ88, CitiNow claims licenses in jurisdictions including Curaçao and Anjouan, the latter being a remote autonomous region of the Comoros Islands. Records list Northern Lights Ltd as the operator of nine official domains, including the CitiNow site.
The platforms themselves are clunky. Scamurai’s attempts to create accounts ran into repeated errors, dead links, and broken forms. Privacy policies were incomplete, and while an app exists, the websites were riddled with problems. Social media presence is also thin. Multiple localised accounts on X had only a few dozen to a few hundred followers despite regular posting.
Outside of its sponsorships, BJ88 and CitiNow barely register in media coverage or online forums.
More troubling are allegations of ties to scam compounds in Cambodia. In January 2025, U.S. gaming company Light & Wonder testified before the Maryland Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, alleging links between BJ88 and the Moc Bai Casino compound in the Cambodian border town of Bavet — a site associated with fraud, trafficking and violent incidents.
As for who is actually behind BJ88, publically available information is limited. Press statements have never named executives, no identifiable employees appear on LinkedIn, and the only profiles associated with the brand are a handful of anonymous, restricted viewing, Vietnam-based accounts.
W88
Emblazoned on the Sunderland shirt this season, W88 signed a deal with the club in June 2025, replacing another betting company as front-of-shirt partner.
W88’s UK footprint is complicated. It’s not linked to TGP but instead the firm was licensed by a little-known white-label service called Midnight Gaming, once based in Poole, Dorset. That office shut down in February 2024, when Midnight Gaming surrendered its licence following regulatory scrutiny.
Despite regulatory troubles, W88 has built a long track record of football sponsorships. Over the years, it has struck deals with Aston Villa, Crystal Palace, Burnley, Leicester City, Fulham and Wolverhampton Wanderers, prior to its new Sunderland agreement.
The announcement of the Sunderland collaboration was worded carefully. The press release stressed that the partnership would be “activated outside the United Kingdom”, reflecting that W88 is not licensed domestically. An unnamed spokesperson from W88 described the deal as “an incredible honour,” also emphasising Sunderland as “the perfect partner to activate with in our overseas target markets.”
The company’s internal structure raises further questions. On LinkedIn, W88’s profile lists nearly a dozen CEOs, several deputy CEOs and employees with the unusual title “w88 at w88.” Many of these accounts use stock photos as profile pictures or the company's logo.
As for ownership, W88 appears to be tied to Marquee Holdings, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands with an address in Hong Kong, according to the Panama Papers.
8xbet
8xbet has sponsored multiple Premier League clubs in recent years, including Manchester City, Bournemouth and Chelsea. Currently, it appears to maintain only a partnership with Chelsea, though the company still advertises itself as a Manchester City sponsor on its social media.
The Chelsea website redirects away from its 8xbet page when accessed from the UK, but remains accessible when viewed abroad.
Manchester City's website has only a copy of a 2022 press release announcing the partnership, which leads to a “not available in your region” page if accessed from the UK.
Like BJ88, 8xbet markets itself as a prominent online bookmaker in the Asia-Pacific region, but little verifiable evidence supports this claim. In testimony before Maryland regulators, gaming company Light & Wonder alleged that 8xbet was linked to the Cambodian border town of Bavet. They claimed it was the sole client of a firm called Great Wall, whose offices sat in a compound surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire.
According to its license in Anjouan, 8xbet is owned by WiseTech Inc., a Seychelles-registered entity. The name matches that of a U.S. software company, though the two are likely unrelated. The registry lists only one domain for 8xbet, which does not match the one promoted on Chelsea’s website.
Further inconsistencies emerged during testing by Scamurai. While the site instructs users to only trust the domain 8xbet.com, that address redirected to 8xbet393.com — neither of which appear on its gambling license.
Like many operators in this space, 8xbet accepts cryptocurrency payments and provides user wallets. Payments on Tron generated fresh wallets, but Ethereum deposits were routed to reused ones, exposing transactional histories. The wallet attached to Scamurai’s test account had received over $4,000 in USDT since August 2024. That wallet, along with hundreds of others, fed into a larger account that had processed more than $428,000 in USDT. This, in turn, was part of a wider cluster of interconnected wallets moving millions of dollars.
On LinkedIn, multiple Vietnamese profiles list 8xbet as their employer, often displaying the company logo as their profile picture. Most list no specific job title beyond “8xbet at 8xbet,” and the majority of the profiles are not viewable to the public.
The Manchester City sponsorship announcement named Ryan Li as its founder but Li, if he exists, has little online footprint. Multiple investigations, including one by football investigative outlet Josimar, have failed to prove who he is.
Stake.com
Compared to the others on this list, there is a little more that's known about Stake. The crypto casino was founded in 2017 by Australia’s youngest billionaire, Ed Craven, and Bijan Tehrani.
Craven, who made his first fortune by launching crypto dice game PrimeDice, is also behind the streaming platform Kick. Kick has lured top creators by taking a far lower cut than competitors like Twitch and its roster includes manosphere influencer Adin Ross, OnlyFans star Amouranth, and streamer (and crypto scammer) Ice Poseidon.
Stake partnered with TGP in 2021 to expand into Britain, following high-profile sponsorships with the UFC and Watford FC. This season its logo is emblazoned on Everton’s shirt though some information on the partnership information have been scrubbed from the UK version of Everton’s site.
Stake has been just as aggressive in its sports sponsorships, splashing money across football clubs and Formula 1. It even purchased the Sauber F1 team outright, rebranding it as the Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber.
But the company’s UK run ended abruptly this year. Stake began shuttering operations in February after complaints over a sexually explicit social media ad featuring viral porn star Bonnie Blue. It formally exited the UK market on March 11.
Even outside the UK, Stake has drawn fire for its marketing. Since late 2024, viral videos on X have been repurposed with Stake branding without the permission of the original creators and without disclosure that they double as gambling ads, a tactic that skirts regulations around gambling ads.
Editor’s notes
On BJ88’s name: Some theories have been raised by football fans that BJ88 has links to the far right due to its name containing the numbers “88”. More likely, as we’re talking about Asia-based companies, the use of “88” is due to the fact that in Chinese culture “8” is considered a lucky number. It is very common for companies, particularly gambling and casino ones, to use “8” or “6” in their names, for example “8xbet” and “BK8”. Additionally, the “BJ” in the name is unlikely to be a reference to “blowjobs”, as has also been suggested, and more likely means “Beijing”. The name of China’s capital is commonly shortened to using its two pinyin initials “BJ”, much as Hong Kong is referred to as “HK”, Shenzhen as “SZ” and Shanghai as “SH”. This is further supported by several online references to the company as 北京88 (Beijing 88).Combined, it further suggests a Chinese link to the company.
Without access to advanced blockchain analytics tools, it’s difficult to give a fully accurate picture of what is happening here as it is impossible to say which wallets are controlled by 8xbet, perhaps beyond the initial one on the site. What we can see however is the deposit address is part of a cluster of wallets that have repeatedly interacted with each other and sent money between them that have not been labelled as major exchanges. This could mean multiple options such as that they are all controlled by 8xbet, or entities linked to 8xbet, or that they belong to different entities who are all using the same broker services or smaller exchanges.
