Too much of a gamble

Ending one income stream won't stop football's toxic link to illegal betting

- Philippe Auclair

Barely anyone outside the gambling world and the sports marketing industry had heard of TGP Europe (The Gaming Platform) before the Great Britain Gambling Commission announced last month that the Isle of Man-based company, which was threatened with a £3.3m fine for multiple violations of anti-money laundering regulations, had chosen to surrender all of its licences and exit the British market.

Yet the aftershock of this apparently inconsequential event was immediately felt throughout the football world, and nowhere more so than within the Premier League.

For more than a decade, TGP Europe had been the discreet conduit through which tens of millions of pounds of sponsorship enriched almost all Premier League clubs, with very few questions asked; money which came directly from some of the most controversial online sports betting operators, which target almost exclusively the illegal Asian market.

In 2024-25, no fewer than 13 Premier League clubs had commercial partnerships in place with clients of TGP, 11 of which operated almost exclusively in jurisdictions where betting on private online platforms is illegal and even criminalised.

This was made possible through the exploitation of a loophole in the UK gambling regulations. TGP Europe, as a so-called white label provider (provision of services under one company), took care of everything. As it was licensed in the UK, it could register .co.uk domain names for its customers. This is how Kaiyun, for example, was able to display its name on the fronts of Nottingham Forest's shirts and the sleeves of Crystal Palace's jerseys despite it not having any working British operation. Its .co.uk website remained "under construction" until it disappeared for good last month.