Arsenal has become the latest top-flight team to sign a betting partnership aimed at leveraging the popularity of the club and the English Premier League in Asia.
The three-year, multi million-pound deal with Bodog follows Arsenal’s recent completion of a pre-season tour of Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan, in a region described by the club today as “of strategic importance to the betting company”.
As the club’s Official Asian Betting Partner, Bodog will be granted access to first-team players for content purposes and also be able to leverage the club’s database to target fans in Asia with Arsenal-related betting offers, the club said today.
The Asian-focused deal will run alongside the club’s Official Betting Partnership with Swedish operator Betsson, which runs a white-label skin under the Gunners Gaming brand.
Bodog’s marketing director Izhar Biran said that Arsenal’s recent tour demonstrated how the club had been “particularly pro-active” in capitalising on the popularity of the English Premier League (EPL) in Asia, and that this was “the perfect partnership” to support Bodog’s already strong growth in the region.
Arsenal’s head of global partnerships, Vinai Venkatesham, added that the partnership with Bodog provided a “strong platform” for deeper engagement with Asian fans following the recent tour, during which the Gunners played in front of hundreds of thousands of local supporters.
The last 12 months have seen betting partnerships replace shirt deals as the preferred form of EPL sponsorship for Asian-facing operators looking to benefit from the heightened brand awareness and spikes in in-play volumes that TV coverage of the league generates in their home markets.
By illustration, SBOBet, which has recently announced no less than three EPL betting partnerships following the end of its shirt deal with West Ham - with Swansea, Norwich and Hull - does not even operate a website for UK punters.
Similarly, fellow ex-EPL shirt sponsor Bodog also closed the doors of its Gambling Commission-licensed Bodog UK business in June of last year, folding it into its Bodog88-branded Asian operating business.
In May 2012, the Bodog name was dropped from West Brom shirts in favour of property website Zoopla after just one of a two-year deal had elapsed, a decision both parties insisted was commercially driven rather than by US federal prosecutors’ indictment several months earlier of Bodog brand founder Calvin Ayre on alleged charges of money laundering and illegal gambling.
Other Asian brands with EPL betting partnerships include 12Bet with Newcastle, Fun88 with Tottenham, Dafabet with West Brom and Everton. Dafabet is also the new shirt sponsor of Aston Villa.
Online gambling by private rather than monopoly operators is largely unregulated at the point of consumption in Asia, with the exception of the Philippines where Bodog88′s Asian licence is held. China and Malaysia have also passed laws criminalising the activity.
Article written by Katy Stirland
