Asian Betting Firm W88 Will Sponsor A New Premier League Club
Author:
Megan Butler
W88 has secured a deal with newly promoted Premier League side Fulham FC to sponsor the club’s home and away strips for the oncoming football season. In a turn of events, the Chinese betting company have somehow snagged a breakthrough contract with one of the England’s Premier League football clubs. A handsome reward for all parties involved, W88 are paying out a lot of money to ensure the branding is done correctly across all Fulham merchandise for the new season. It’s predicted to help boost players by over 25% in the first month of the new season.
W88 has struck a deal with English football club Fulham FC to sponsor all of their merchandise for the new season, a landmark deal which could be extremely profitable for both parties.
?derJani/Pixabay
W88 are currently on a record high after the contract with Fulham FC went through last week. Both sets of negotiation teams worked incredibly hard on this deal, which took much longer than anticipated for ratification. While representatives from W88 flew to London to ensure the deal was successful, investors back in China have been anxious to find out the result, and it’s safe to say they will all be extremely pleased. The profitability of the deal is predicted to be extremely high, with website users expected to almost double within the first quarter.
Despite the result, it took a lot of effort for the company to pull off a procedure like this. With many moving parts and points of contact, setting up a merchandise sponsorship in England is extremely difficult for an online betting firm in China. While they continue to work on other branding ideas, the company’s main focus is now on the English football scene as Fulham will make their way back into the Premier League after consecutive relegations the last two times they were in the top flight.
It’s still unknown how successful this deal may end up being, but industry analysts have expressed confidence when reviewing quarterly predictions for the 2023 calendar. W88 are in the middle of several deals as they try to orchestrate other sponsorship ideas with sporting clubs around the world. Rumours of a La Liga side interested in working with them have sparked a large wave of media attention in Spain due to the irregularity of online betting sponsorship in the country. Barcelona and Real Madrid have both used Chinese betting firms on their merchandise in the past, so it isn’t out of the question for another club to do the same.
Fulham FC has also agreed to delay the announcement of their new home and away kits for the 2022/23 season to accommodate the lateness of the W88 deal. This will allow the Chinese betting firm more time to prepare marketing materials and make any quality-of-life changes to the websites as a new wave of players is set to rush through to the landing page. Leading developers have suggested that bug fixes are needed for several domains due to old webpage design causing customer sign-on issues, which in turn loses them valuable revenue and website traffic.
China’s Online Betting Sponsorship
China has a massive number of online betting companies that work with other organizations abroad to negotiate merchandise sponsorships. Several other English clubs are currently working with Chinese gambling firms, including Southampton FC, and Brentford FC is just two of many others involved in the same business. While there is always room for expansion, W88 are content to work with Fulham, for now, to test how well the sponsorship does in the new season and allow the figures to inform future branding strategies.
Premier League clubs have come under fire for working with Chinese betting companies as the view in England is much more distasteful than those in Asia. The British public is generally against the inclusion of foreign gambling firms as they are deemed suspicious by many supporters. W88, on the other hand, have proven their worth through a number of highly maintained gambling domains that have a combined player base of 1.5million across the world. The only place that cannot use them is China which has become a strange juxtaposition as many of the biggest online casino platforms are based in Shanghai and Beijing.
