Sponsorship: major changes among LaLiga Santander clubs for the 2021-22 season

The 2021-22 LaLiga Santander season begins this Friday 13/08/2021 with 49 new sponsorship deals among the 20 participating clubs (as of 13/08/2021), compared to 133 over the entire 2020-21 season.

For this new season, the restrictions on the advertising of gambling operators come as a major upheaval for the Spanish league. The new Royal Decree 958/2020 prohibits clubs from displaying bookmakers as shirt sponsors. In 2020-21, eight teams displayed a betting operator on their kit, seven of them as main shirt sponsors, the most expensive sponsorship space. Betway paid almost €5 million to put its logo on the shirts of three Spanish clubs. The Spanish media report an annual loss of €90 million for clubs in both men's professional divisions.

Spain thus joins Italy, which has banned gambling advertising in sport since 2019-20. As many clubs have already done in Italy, some Spanish teams have already found a way to continue to make agreements with betting operators by reclassifying the partnership as an "entertainment partner" (if the operator allows it) and locating the agreement in a…