Premier League clubs are starting the new season without gambling companies on the front of their matchday shirts, as a league-wide restriction takes effect.

The change has forced eight of the league’s 20 clubs to find new front-of-shirt partners for the 2026/27 season, putting some of the most valuable advertising real estate in global sports on the market at the same time.

At Fulham Football Club, online betting company SBOTOP has been replaced by ClickHouse, a Silicon Valley data infrastructure company.

With several clubs all looking for new sponsors at the same time, companies such as ClickHouse suddenly had access to opportunities that might otherwise have been harder to come by.

“There’s a unique opportunity to become a sponsor of such an institution, and we just couldn’t pass it up,” Tanya Bragin, vice president of product and marketing at ClickHouse, told CNBC.

The influx of available sponsorship inventory may also have given prospective partners greater leverage in negotiations.

“If there’s more inventory coming on the market at the same time, it’s a buyer’s market,” Bragin said.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Premier League sponsorship has become cheaper. Bragin said the opportunities presented to ClickHouse remained competitive, reflecting continued demand for exposure through one of the world’s most-watched sports leagues.

For ClickHouse, choosing a Premier League club was not simply about finding the biggest name available. Sponsoring one of the Premier League’s biggest clubs would have required a considerably larger investment, making Fulham — which finished 11th in the 20-team league last season — a more attractive proposition.

“Transparently speaking, 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.”

London was another major factor, with ClickHouse viewing the partnership with a team based in the U.K. capital as both a global marketing opportunity and an ideal venue for entertaining customers and partners.

“For me personally, in terms of leading our marketing and go-to-market efforts, hospitality was key,” Bragin said.

For bookmakers, Premier League sponsorship offered access to millions of potential customers who could directly use their products. The companies replacing them may value football for entirely different reasons.

That shift is playing out elsewhere across the league, with new sectors moving into positions previously occupied by betting brands. Everton replaced betting company Stake with financial services firm CMC Markets, while Brentford swapped Hollywoodbets for recruitment platform Indeed.

But the bookmakers themselves aren’t necessarily leaving football. Henry Beesley, marketing manager at British bookmaker Fitzdares, said the industry has had years to prepare.

“It’s been on the horizon for a while. Bookmakers are prepared for it,” Beesley told CNBC.

Fenway Sports Group sold a minority stake in Liverpool Football Club to a consortium including Jeff Bezos on Friday, in a deal worth over $7 billion. 

Almost 16 years after the Boston-based group rescued Liverpool from the brink of administration for a cut-price £300 million ($405.9 million), FSG partially cashes out with an enormous return on investment after a remarkable turnaround that saw the Merseyside club win multiple domestic and European trophies.

But while English football clubs are increasingly drawing interest from sophisticated investors across the globe, they remain risky and often unprofitable ventures. 

Deloitte’s annual football finance review found that aggregate pre-tax losses for the 20 English Premier League clubs totaled £948 million in the 2024/25 season, a “notable deterioration” of more than 600% from the previous season. 

Only eight clubs reported an operating profit that year, compared to 13 in the season before, according to Deloitte. 

Inflated transfer fees for players are a key driver of high operating costs. 

“With expenditure on player transfers having grown to keep pace with the ever-escalating race for talent, the likelihood is that this will have been another year of substantial financial losses,” Deloitte researchers wrote. 

But FSG’s Liverpool deal demonstrates the opportunity to buy undervalued assets and sell them on at higher prices later, with growing interest in the game propelling teams to ever-higher valuations. 

“Even if you’re not making a profit day-in, day-out, the value of the asset is still going up, and there are plenty of assets within it that can then be licensed out,” Richard Haigh, global managing director at Brand Finance, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday. 

This is down to the reputation and scarcity that specifically elite clubs can offer, Haigh said. 

“The English Premier League really does help UK soft power,” he added. “It is one of the oldest leagues in the sporting world, it has a global reach, and it is extremely lucrative in boosting business values to those who sponsor it.”

Clubs are increasingly optimizing their existing revenue streams, such as matchday ticketing revenues. 

“The other thing that American sports do incredibly well, which investors are looking to do in Europe, is that the stadium and surrounding real estate is a 24/7, 365-day revenue generator rather than a place that only makes money once every two weeks,” said Lewis Gaut, partner and sports finance specialist at Goodwin. 

UBS wrote in June that Tottenham Hotspur FC’s new stadium, built in 2019 and costing £1.2 billion, contributed to commercial income jumping from £117 million in 2018 to £215 million in 2022. 

In…

Indian cricket is increasingly becoming hot property for investors looking to cash in on the booming business of the wildly popular sport in the subcontinent.

In little over a month, the Indian Premier League, or IPL, has seen two of its franchises being sold to investors at billion-dollar-plus valuations, the latest being the Rajasthan Royals that was bought this Sunday, valued at $1.65 billion.

A consortium of U.S. investors led by Kal Somani and backed by Rob Walton of Walmart Group was in the fray to acquire Rajasthan Royals, according to multiple media reports, but lost out to global steel magnate Laxmi Mittal and Indian vaccine tycoon Adar Poonawalla.

Somani’s group expressed disappointment at not being able to own the franchise, according to ESPN. “We were all motivated by the opportunity to help take the IPL to new international heights,” the consortium reportedly said.

In late March, a group comprising Blackstone and serial American sports investor David Blitzer acquired IPL’s Royal Challengers Bengaluru, or RCB, franchise in a $1.8 billion deal.

IPL is a fast‑paced, franchise‑based cricket league launched in 2008 that blends top international and Indian talent. Played each year over nearly two months, it features 10 teams, offering a mix of high‑intensity cricket, celebrity ownership, entertainment, and massive TV and streaming audiences.

A history of strong capital returns and potential to scale up the franchises backed by a fanbase of nearly a billion people is leading to heightened interest from global investors in the IPL, experts said.

“IPL has become highly attractive to investors because it combines strong capital appreciation potential with stable, recurring cash flows,” James Walton, sports business group leader, Deloitte Asia Pacific, told CNBC in an email.

On a per-match basis, IPL is already the second most valued sports league after the NFL, according to Deloitte. IPL valuation is estimated at $18.5 billion, as against the NFL’s $227 billion and the NBA’s $165 billion in 2025, but compared with IPL’s 74 matches, NFL teams play 272 games, and 30 NBA teams play 82 games per team each season.

Besides cash flows and valuations, investor returns have also been quite stellar. “Compared with global deal benchmarks, IPL returns stand out for their speed and growth profile,” Walton said, estimating that private equity firm CVC Capital earned 350% return last year when it sold its 67% stake in IPL franchise Gujarat Titans. CVC had acquired Gujarat Titans in 2021.