Gambling Sponsorship Dominance in Belgian Football Is Fueling Political Pushback

Belgian football remains deeply intertwined with the gambling industry. Despite increasingly strict advertising rules, a clear majority of first-division clubs continue to feature gambling-linked brands as their primary shirt sponsor.

For the 2025–26 season of the Belgian Pro League, roughly 10 out of 16 clubs display a sponsor that is a derivative brand of a licensed gambling operator. From a regulatory perspective, this level of concentration is no longer seen as incidental—it is interpreted as systemic.

This reality is increasingly shaping how policymakers assess the effectiveness of current gambling legislation.

While front-of-shirt gambling advertising has been formally restricted, gambling visibility in Belgian football has not disappeared. Instead, it has shifted toward indirect branding structures designed to remain technically compliant.

Common examples include:

These brands rarely offer standalone economic value. Their primary function is continued brand exposure, not profitability. For policymakers, this reinforces the perception that gambling advertising has been reengineered rather than reduced.

Individually, most of these arrangements can be defended as legally compliant. Collectively, they tell a very different story.

When the majority of a national top league remains commercially linked to gambling brands, lawmakers are unlikely to view this as good-faith adaptation. Instead, it is increasingly seen as evidence that partial bans are structurally ineffective.

An often-overlooked consequence of these practices is their impact on market structure. Only large international gambling groups have the financial capacity to create and maintain complex sub-brand ecosystems that:

Smaller Belgian operators simply cannot afford to run parallel media platforms, content brands, or visibility-only entities that do not contribute to profitability. As a result, current grey-zone strategies favour scale over compliance culture.

Ironically, this dynamic runs directly counter to one of the original policy goals: maintaining a balanced, locally anchored regulated market. Instead, borderline practices are accelerating market concentration in favour of multinational groups.

For policymakers, this evolution is deeply problematic: gambling-linked brands remain highly visible.

This combination is politically explosive. It helps explain why proposals now circulating go far beyond sponsorship and target the core mechanics of gambling itself, including night-time shutdowns of online gambling.

These are not abstract ideas—they are retaliatory responses to a system perceived as being gamed.

From a commercial perspective, indirect branding delivers short-term stability for clubs and visibility for operators. Politically, however, the cost is rising fast.

When lawmakers conclude that legislation fails to reduce gambling exposure, the typical response is not fine-tuning—but hard resets. Transitional measures disappear. Flexibility vanishes. Enforcement tightens across the board.

The dominance of gambling-linked sponsorships in Belgian football is no longer viewed as a temporary side-effect of transition. It is increasingly framed as proof that the current model does not work.

From a Casinorating perspective, the message is clear: borderline compliance may buy time, but it also justifies harsher intervention and deeper restrictions.

In the current political climate, creative workarounds are becoming liabilities—and the next regulatory step may leave far less room for manoeuvre.