Liverpool Joins UK Coalition Pushing to End Gambling Ads as Football Sponsorship Money Shrinks

Liverpool City Council has joined the Coalition to End Gambling Ads (CEGA), becoming the largest city outside London to sign up to a campaign lobbying the UK government to restrict gambling advertising. The move brings the number of aligned local authorities to 16 and hands the campaign a marquee name in a city where football and betting sponsorship are tightly bound. Liverpool joins a group that already includes public health bodies, charities and, notably, football clubs, at a moment when the sport is being pulled out of the very sponsorship deals that fund it.

CEGA was founded at the start of 2025 and has grown from a cluster of London boroughs, Barnet, Brent, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey and Lewisham, into a national bloc that now counts Blackpool, Bristol, Devon, East Suffolk and Southampton among its members. Alongside councils, it draws in the Association of Directors of Public Health, the Royal Society for Public Health and the Faculty of Public Health, plus campaign groups and clubs. Will Prochaska, CEGA's director, framed the sign-up as a public health call, saying Liverpool was "showing real leadership by recognising the harm gambling can cause." Many members are also pressing for local councils to be handed stronger powers to reject planning applications for betting and gaming premises, a demand that would move the fight from advertising into physical high-street inventory.

Liverpool's council tied the decision to its Reducing Gambling Harms Action Plan, introduced earlier this year, which sets out a citywide approach built on prevention, early intervention and easier access to support. The council cited research indicating that roughly one in six young adults in Liverpool are affected by gambling harm, with men and people facing financial hardship most at risk. Councillor Harry Doyle, Cabinet Member for Health, Wellbeing and Culture, said gambling harm "can leave people struggling with debt, damage relationships, affect mental health and place huge pressure on families," adding that "gambling advertising is now everywhere, from TV and social media to sport and public spaces." Professor Matthew Ashton, the city's Director of Public Health, said the plan "takes a public health approach" and that joining CEGA lets Liverpool "play its part in a growing national movement calling for evidence-based changes to gambling advertising." The council has run awareness work before, including initiatives with the charity Chapter One during the FIFA World Cup.

Why the timing matters for operators

The council's stance would be one more local resolution if it were not landing in the same year football starts unwinding its gambling money. The UK debate over gambling promotion has already forced the industry onto the defensive, and the numbers behind football sponsorship show how much is exposed. Great Britain-licensed operators spent about £1.15 billion (roughly $1.5 billion) on advertising and sponsorship between October 2023 and September 2024, per Betting and Gaming Council figures, while independent estimates from the World Advertising Research Center put total gambling ad spend nearer £2 billion (about $2.6 billion) a year. Football is a large slice of that: gambling companies accounted for around £120 million (roughly $157 million) in annual sponsorship across England's top two divisions before the phase-out was announced.

That phase-out is the precedent that gives this campaign teeth. In April 2023, Premier League clubs collectively agreed to remove gambling brands from the front of matchday shirts, the first UK league to do so, with the change taking effect from the end of the 2025/26 season and new rules applying in 2026/27. The revenue hole is real and quantified. Analysts have pegged the collective annual loss at about £80 million ($105 million), with some valuations of current front-of-shirt deals exceeding £140 million ($183 million) a season.

The replacement market is already repricing, and the direction is down. Outside the big six clubs, non-gambling shirt offers have reportedly come in at roughly half the £8 million to £12 million a season that gambling brands were paying, and a dozen top-flight clubs went into the summer without confirmed front-of-shirt partners. Sleeve badges, stadium signage and official-partner slots remain open to licensed operators, so the shirt ban narrows the highest-value inventory rather than closing the channel entirely. The pressure is compounding from another direction too: on 23 February 2026 the government announced a consultation on barring unlicensed operators from sponsoring British sports teams at all, aimed partly at brands owned by TGP Europe that lost their UK licence but still appear on Premier League shirts.

The affiliate and operator read

For operators, the squeeze is on premium football reach, not on marketing budgets, which have to go somewhere. Independent monitoring found gambling marketing messages during Premier League broadcasts tripled from 10,999 to 27,440 between 2023 and 2025 even under a football-wide code of conduct, which suggests spend displaced by the shirt ban is migrating into broadcast, digital and in-stadium placements rather than disappearing. That migration is the affiliate opportunity and the affiliate risk in one. As front-of-shirt deals thin out, licensed operators lean harder on performance and affiliate channels to defend acquisition, which lifts value for compliant partners. It also concentrates regulatory attention on exactly those channels, echoing the scrutiny of celebrity and likeness-driven betting ads seen elsewhere. Local councils demanding planning powers, meanwhile, would push the same logic into retail, where a rejected licence for a betting shop is a permanent loss of a physical acquisition point rather than a paused campaign.

CEGA's demand is a national restriction on gambling advertising, and it does not yet have one. What it has is 16 councils, a bench of public health institutions and a live government consultation moving in its direction, set against a football sponsorship market that is contracting on its own timetable. The next signal to watch is the scope of that spring consultation and whether the shirt-front precedent extends to sleeves and stadiums, the placements operators are counting on to keep their football footprint.