How Sky Bet's partnership with EFL is evolving for the better: Steve Birch

But one constant over the past decade has been our partnership with the English Football League (EFL).

The 2013-2014 marked our first season together and the start of one of the longest and most successful agreements in UK professional sport.

Both organisations have since gone from the strength-to-strength. Sky Bet is now one of the UK’s best-known consumer brands and part of Flutter Entertainment – the world’s leading sports betting and gaming company – while the opening weekend of this season’s EFL Championship was the most watched on Sky Sports ever, with over half a million football fans attending games around the UK across the three divisions.

This mutual success was a key driver behind Sky Bet’s recent decision to seal a new five-year extension with the EFL that will see the partnership continue until the end of the 2028/29 campaign.

The deal includes a new rights fee which represents a 50 per cent increase from Sky Bet and will provide much-needed revenues for EFL clubs, supporting the League’s main objective to make all 72 clubs financially sustainable, particularly after the Covid pandemic.

We firmly believe that regulated gambling businesses should be able to continue to advertise around football, and that football should be able to benefit from the revenue that brings. But we do recognise there are risks for the small proportion of customers.

That’s why the new agreement with the EFL continues to be centred around the promotion of safer gambling and includes a refreshed Memorandum of Understanding which sets out how to achieve our joint aims in a socially responsible way. Neatly aligned with the principles of Flutter’s global safer gambling strategy, we believe the latest partnership will allow us to deliver real change for our customers, our colleagues across the UK, as well as the communities in which we operate and serve.

For our customers, our priorities remain toward the protection of children and other vulnerable individuals potentially at risk from gambling harm. This is why both Sky Bet and the EFL have made a renewed commitment to its approach in the promotion of products.

As part of this, Sky Bet will not actively market itself or its products in family areas of club stadiums, nor advertise to young fans. It will use a proportion of the EFL’s marketing inventory to promote safer gambling messaging, as well as Sky Bet’s campaigns in this vital area.

And working with another long-standing partner, EPIC Risk, Sky Bet will help fund a programme across the EFL’s 72 clubs that will educate players on the potential dangers of gambling, while providing support and advice to those at these clubs that may need it.

It was notable for me that our work in this area meant that the Government’s White Paper on gambling earlier this year highlighted the emphasis ourselves and the EFL put on social responsibility and used it as an example for others to learn from when looking at sports sponsorship.

It’s not just the clubs who benefit. The partnership will also be rewarding to Flutter’s UK-based colleagues and will involve many of the near 2,000 employees who work in the Yorkshire region, most of whom are based in our state-of-the-art hub in Leeds.

Not only will those within Sky Bet’s marketing, brand and content teams continue to enjoy working collaboratively with one of the most prominent sporting organisations in the UK, others will share learnings from the partnership with Government and other bodies to help inform the first-ever sports sponsorship code of conduct being developed in accordance with proposals set out as part of the Gambling Act Review.

Similar to the most successful EFL clubs, this work will involve a true team effort internally across Flutter.

Finally, the extended partnership will greatly benefit the communities from where our customers and colleagues come from up and down the UK. Central to this will be a brand-new Community Fund, which will see Sky Bet provide £1m per season and £6m in total for the EFL to invest in communities across England and Wales where its clubs are located.

Sky Bet and the EFL will use this vital funding to deliver activity via the EFL Trust and its powerful network of Club Community Organisations.

All this makes for a very exciting season for all of us at Sky Bet regardless of the football results. However, whether you are cheering on the Whites, the Tykes or the Bantams, we wish everyone supporting clubs in Yorkshire every success in the months ahead and want you to know that through our EFL partnership, we will be working as hard as your favourite player to deliver a positive impact for you, the fans, and everyone else closely involved in the beautiful game.

Steve Birch is Chief Commercial Officer of Sky Betting & Gaming. It is part of Flutter UK and Ireland, who will be co-sponsoring the Yorkshire Data and Digital Conference at its technology hub in Leeds on September 19.