Four years after Grondona’s death, the entity was dismantled and each province, including the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, had no problem granting the new licenses. Since the Autonomous City and the Province of Buenos Aires approved their arrival in 2019, which was implemented a year later and whose licenses were granted in mid-2021, online betting houses have fully entered the universe of Argentine soccer as sponsors in team jerseys and becoming a great source of income for the clubs.
The sponsorship business in Argentine football is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Since the beginning of this month, Codere, the Spanish multinational gaming company, is the main sponsor of River, replacing the airline Turkey Airlines. The contract will run until August 2025 and the Núñez club will receive a total of $12,000,000. Codere has 13 game rooms in the Province. More than 6,800 machines in bingo halls, casinos, racetracks.
With its headquarters in Madrid, it is an emblem of a sector that has expanded economically and geographically, Codere is not new in the soccer marketing arena: it was for years on the shirts of Banfield, Lanús and Deportivo Morón, three of the suburban areas where established its bingo halls. However, in January of last year it was left out of the award of seven online gaming licenses in the province of Buenos Aires.
Arrival
Instead, the former president of Boca, Daniel Angelici, registered a license through Atlántica de Juegos, associated with the Canadian multinational pokerstars, based in the British tax haven of the Isle of Man. Codere’s arrival in the country can also be explained by what happens in its country of origin: Spain banned in 2020 the advertising of online bookmakers in football teams and stadiums.
Also, City Center, the electronic betting division of the Rosario Casino, controlled by Ricardo Benedicto, is a sponsor of Rosario Central and Newell’s for the whole of 2022 and it transpired that it contributes around $40,000,000 to Rosario institutions. Finally, BPlay, the virtual betting portal, sponsors Vélez and he not only appears on the Estudiantes de La Plata jersey, but also in the Uno stadium and in the City Bell Country.
Also, BetWarrior signed a four-year contract with AFA a few months ago to be a sponsor of the Argentine Soccer Team after closing an agreement for the next four years. By the way, in addition to Bet Warrior, Codere, BPlay and CityCdnter, the companies that operate in Argentina are: Bet365, William Hill, Playtech, Betsson, Pokerstars, Jugadon and Super7. In Buenos Aires alone there are 12: seven are on Buenos Aires soil and five are in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. The others are diversified in the rest of the country: Neuquén, Río Negro, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Mendoza, San Luis, La Pampa, Tucumán, Chaco and Misiones.
Everything is bet, not only a result, but the number of corners, fouls, expulsions, warnings, minutes in which they happen. The range of bets is wide, however, the Argentine clubs do not receive a single penny, only that tiny group that shows off the advertising of online bookmakers on the chest of their shirts.
Argentina began to open the doors to online platforms to be part of its sponsorships in the main national soccer clubs, continuing with a regional current.
In Southamerica
Not only Conmebol has Betfair as a sponsor of continental tournaments since 2019: the commercial name of the First Division of Colombia is Liga BetPlay Dimayor; the tournament in Peru is called Liga 1 Betsson; Series A in Ecuador is called LigaPro Betcris and in Brazil, although there are still no legal licensees, the gray of the regulation allows 16 of the 20 teams in the First Division to carry betting advertisements on their shirts.
The arrival of football betting not only came to stir up social gambling but also to sow a cloak of suspicion about alleged result fixing. This was one of the reasons why in the second and third of the most important leagues in Europe – that of Spain and Italy – sports sponsorships related to bookmakers were prohibited or directly disappeared and, in the most important, the Premier English is about to follow the same path.
In July 2018, the Italian Government revolutionizes the sports betting sector, but far from stimulating it, it decided to veto its advertising. At that time, it was estimated that more than half of the Serie A teams had agreements with bookmakers, which meant missing around 700 million euros for the state coffers. As a consequence of the impact of the pandemic, the league asked the Italian government to lift the ban until June 2023, in addition to the creation of a fund called “Save Football Fund”. 1% would be allocated to this fund
Source: Ambito
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