SkyBet launch Building Foundations fund to put £1m a year back into EFL football communities

SkyBet is launching its Building Foundations Fund at Barnsley’s Oakwell stadium today, offering all 72 clubs £10,000 in the first instance and the chance to bid for a slice of the remaining £280,000 in the first year’s instalment of £1m.

Thereafter, SkyBet have committed to putting £1m a year into the fund over the next five years. SkyBet ambassador Jeff Stelling will agree the winning bids across a range of categories, such as improving local sporting facilities or promoting the physical and social benefits of the game.

Barnsley Football Club have been chosen as the site for the launch because of the work they have done with their walking football programme, an existing community scheme for over 35’s that will benefit from the 2023/24 funding.

Dan Colton, managing director of SkyBet, told The Yorkshire Post. "We already have this relationship with the EFL but we want to do more, we want to lead from the front, we want to be the most trusted gambling operators in the country and giving back to the community feels like a really important way of doing that.

"Every club will have £10,000 available to them, and up to £100,000 if you can put a really effective case forward.

"There’s a huge amount of stuff a club can do in driving activity, social cohesion in their communities.

"Now more than ever, clubs outside the Premier League don’t have the cash to do the things in their communities that t hey’d like to. The pandemic made that even harder. These are no longer wealthy organisations but they might have some great ideas.

"This money doesn’t solve all their problems, but it gives them the opportunity to do those things they so desperately want to do.”

Gambling sponsorship in football is increasingly common but also controversial, given the addiction problems the industry promotes.

With initiatives like the Building Foundations fund, SkyBet are hoping to give something back.

" I can only really speak for SkyBet, but we work incredibly hard to be as safe and as fair and as enjoyable an experience as possible,” said Colton.

"We are incredibly careful about what we do in terms of messaging and making sure it doesn’t go to kids. All gambling operators are dumped together in one amorphous thing that is not to be trusted, and I don’t think that’s fair, which is why we really want to separate ourselves and prove we are a really trustworthy business.”

SkyBet has been the title sponsor of the EFL since 2013 and this year the two parties agreed to extend that agreement to the end of the 2028/29 season.

"The E FL has really done an amazing job of growing its status as a standalone existence,” said Colton. “Their ability to grow and get viewership on TV, the fact they’ve done recent deals with ourselves and Sky Sports at increased fees is illustrative of that. The league is going from strength to strength.”