University of Nottingham researchers found gambling branding visible for nearly one-third of sampled Premier League YouTube highlights. Exposure was far higher than in official FIFA World Cup clips, with pitchside boards and LED displays the main sources.
The findings suggest the Premier League’s 2026/27 front-of-shirt withdrawal will address only part of this exposure. They also raise questions about how embedded gambling branding should be measured and regulated.
Gambling branding appeared during 32.6% of Premier League highlights screen time compared with 1.5% of World Cup footage.
Pitchside boards and LED displays accounted for 50.4% of gambling brand appearances in the Premier League sample.
Front-of-shirt sponsorship represented only 27.1% of recorded gambling appearances and was not the dominant source of exposure.
The research is a non-peer-reviewed preprint based on a small purposive sample and should not be treated as representative of all football coverage.
The University of Nottingham research paper analysed 27 football highlights packages. These comprised Sky Sports coverage of the final 10 Premier League matches of the 2025/26 season and official FIFA YouTube highlights from 17 matches at the 2026 World Cup.
Researchers recorded brand appearances lasting at least two seconds and categorised them by commodity type, placement and the point in the match at which they appeared. Kit manufacturer logos were excluded. Data collection took place between 4 June and 27 July 2026, while five packages were coded by more than one researcher. The reported Cohen’s kappa score of 0.85 indicated a high level of agreement between coders.
Branding such as gambling, alcohol, high-fat, salt, and sugar products and trading-related services occupied 38% of Premier League highlights screen time. The equivalent figure for World Cup footage was 18.7%. Gambling was responsible for most of this difference, while food and drink branding was more prominent in the World Cup sample.
The researchers also examined advertising served before the videos. Gambling operators supplied 10 of the 12 pre-roll adverts recorded ahead of Premier League highlights, accounting for 123 of 153 advertising seconds. None of the 21 adverts served before the sampled World Cup packages promoted a gambling brand.
The placement data is particularly significant because it shows that shirt sponsorship is only one component of gambling’s visibility within football coverage. Pitchside and LED advertising accounted for just over half of the recorded gambling appearances. Stadium signage represented another 10.1%, while shirt sleeves contributed 5.4%.
The Premier League’s front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship withdrawal therefore applies to a placement that generated approximately one-quarter of the appearances in the study. Sleeve sponsorships, pitchside displays, training wear and other commercial assets remain available under the voluntary agreement.
The Premier League footage was recorded before the withdrawal came into force for the 2026/27 season. Consequently, the research does not directly measure branding levels following the change. It does, however, establish that most exposure in the sampled footage originated from locations unaffected by the agreement.
This distinction matters commercially. A front-of-shirt logo provides a prominent and consistent association with a club, while LED boards can repeatedly place a brand within the camera frame during goals, attacks and other high-engagement moments. Highlights then preserve and redistribute those appearances across YouTube and other digital channels long after the live broadcast has ended.
Short-form highlights concentrate memorable match events into packages lasting only a few minutes. Branding positioned around the pitch can therefore receive repeated exposure during goals, replays, and close-up footage, even when the viewer has not actively chosen to watch gambling-related content.
This distribution model strengthens calls for a public-health approach to gambling advertising. Current policy discussions increasingly extend beyond conventional advert breaks to include sponsorship assets, digital targeting, and branding embedded within sports coverage.
The pre-roll findings also show that viewers may encounter two separate marketing layers. They can be served a conventional gambling advert before the video and then see further operator branding throughout the match footage. For compliance teams, this creates a fragmented environment involving clubs, broadcasters, platforms, sponsors and advertising technology providers.
The development of automated monitoring of gambling advertising reflects the wider regulatory focus on digital content with strong appeal to under-18s. Embedded stadium branding may nevertheless be more difficult to assess than a standalone advert because it appears as part of editorial sports footage rather than as a separately delivered campaign.
The results require careful interpretation. The paper is a preprint and had not undergone peer review at the time of publication. Its purposive sample covered only 27 highlights packages from two publishers, including 10 Premier League matches and 17 World Cup matches. It cannot establish the average level of exposure across a full domestic season, every World Cup fixture or highlights produced by other broadcasters and platforms.
Advertising delivery on YouTube can also vary according to location, account history, device and collection time. The pre-roll adverts observed by the researchers may therefore differ from those shown to other users. Screen-time measurements demonstrate potential exposure but do not establish how many viewers noticed individual brands or whether those appearances influenced gambling behaviour.
Even with these limitations, the study offers a useful placement-level view of football sponsorship. For operators and rights holders, the findings show why commercial inventories cannot be evaluated through shirt sponsorship alone. For policymakers, they indicate that restrictions focused on one visible asset may shift branding elsewhere without necessarily delivering an equivalent reduction in total exposure.
