European Cricket gets boost with Stake.com sponsorship deal
European Cricket has announced that online crypto sports betting provider Stake.com will sponsor the European Cricket Championship this year, which is a private tournament that will span from September 12 to October 14 in Malaga this year. The tournament will have a total of 120 games between 21 teams during that period.
Stake.com has likely banked on tapping the cricket audience in the Indian subcontinent, which will be a large part of the expected 40 million per day viewership. ©Aksh yadav/Unsplash
The deal represents a significant boost for the profile of the tournament, which isn’t officially in the calendar of the International Cricket Council (ICC), but plays a crucial role in setting up cricket at a grassroots level and opens up avenues for more professional cricketers in a region that is yet to fully take to the sport.
An official release from the European Cricket Network said that the involvement of Stake.com – who will sit alongside India-based fantasy sports giants Dream11 and streaming partners Fancode – is expected to take the platform to at least 40 million viewers per day. As part of the deal, Stake.com will receive “significant branding” through TV graphics that ECC says will go out to a global audience. Roger Feiner, the CEO of European Cricket League, said that the deal represented the coming together of two innovators, while also pointing out the illustrious company European Cricket would be in as part of Stake.com’s portfolio.
“European Cricket is proud to partner with Stake.com, one of the most innovative and engaging companies within this sector, for the European Cricket Championships 2022. With this engagement, European Cricket is proud to sit alongside other first-class sponsorships of Stake.com such as their partnerships with Premier League team Everton FC, Indian Super League team Mumbai City FC and several other high-profile global partnerships that include UFC and Sergio Aguero. Like Stake.com we are innovators and we believe there can be a lot of overlap between our companies when it comes to principles and best practices. We are particularly excited about our new evening matches for Stake.com that will be broadcast primetime into the cricket key markets.
Big viewership numbers for an unofficial tournament
The European Cricket Championship’s (ECC’s) claims of hitting a viewership of 40 million per day is at once staggering but also believable. Cricket enjoys a large audience base simply by virtue of being the most popular sport in the Indian subcontinent, which houses a large part of the world’s population. With an established fantasy market in India, platforms like Dream11 and Fancode have managed to open up niche sports – particularly cricket in regions outside the 12 top-tier countries that play it – to a whole swathe of players who look for opportunities in smaller player pools.
Alongside the emergence of this highly engaged fantasy audience, online sports betting has managed to venture into Indian broadcast spaces as well, with prominent names like Betway, 1XBET, Pariplay, and DafaBet all making imprints in the region – mostly through news-led surrogate advertisements. Stake.com’s involvement in this tournament is likely built around the opportunity of joining that list, as it is all but guaranteed that large parts of the 40 million viewership is going to be from the region.
The ECC, as mentioned earlier, is not an officially recognized tournament between European nations, but instead consists of unofficially declared squads that play outside the purview of their nations’ cricketing boards. England, Netherlands, Scotland, and Ireland, for instance, all have teams playing in the ECC who aren’t affiliated with their respective – and relatively prominent in the region – cricket boards. In that context, the viewership expected for this tournament without any international stars is a massive endorsement of the state of cricket in the subcontinent.
Stake.com have been in the news lately
Early this month, UK media reported that Stake UK, who sponsor English Premier League club Everton FC were being sued to the tune of $400 million by a former partner who claimed to have been bullied out of the business by co-founders Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven.
The suit was filed by Christopher Freeman, who was reportedly part of Primedice – the precursor to Stake.com of which he was part of alongside Tehrani and Craven. Freeman claimed that it was his idea to expand Primedice into a crypto casino, as opposed to the other co-founders’ views of sticking with a traditional online casino route. Over time, he alleged, his holding in Primedice was reduced, his system access revoked, and Tehrani and Craven went on to build what is now Stake.com, which is a unicorn company. Tehrani and Craven have denied the allegations, which they’ve said are “intentionally misleading and provably false”.
While this case plays out, it is pertinent to note that football in Europe – and especially in the UK – has run into troubled waters with respect to its close ties to gambling sponsorships and advertisements. In April this year, 20 football clubs in the UK petitioned for gambling advertisement bans with a view to remove football’s financial dependence on gambling. Stake.com has been an officially licensed provider in the UK since December 2021.
