From Pirelli to Betsson: the Shift that Changed Italian Football’s Shirt Fronts

Between 1995/96 and 2021, the front of Inter’s shirt was one of the most recognisable football shirts in the world. Pirelli were the official shirt sponsors for a staggering 26 consecutive seasons, a partnership that ranks among the longest-running shirt sponsorships in the history of Italian football! It’s also a deal which is believed to have generated more than €200m for the club.

What followed was the kind of volatility that Inter hadn’t experienced since sponsorship arrived in Serie A back in the early 1980s. Socios.com took the shirt for the 2021/22 season, while DigitalBits followed up for 2022/23 – a deal that was terminated early when the crypto company failed to make payments. Paramount+ covered 2023/24, which means there were four different sponsors in four seasons – at a club that had kept the same one for a quarter of a century beforehand!

Stability returned in summer 2024, and it arrived from the betting industry. Inter signed a four-year agreement with Betsson reported at €30m a season, easily the largest shirt deal in Serie A history and more than double what Pirelli had been paying at the end. Analysis by Italian site GiocoResponsabile values the current Serie A betting sponsorship market at roughly €38.5m a year, too.

Betting Brands Return Under New Names

There’s also a pretty historical oddity at play here, because Italy actually banned gambling advertising back in 2018 through the Decreto Dignità, a law that, on the face of it, should have made such an agreement impossible. Serie A shirts, however, continue to carry betting-linked branding because the sponsoring entities are technically separate companies.

Betsson, for example, created Betsson Sport. Betway opened a Betway Scores brand, and Bet365 opened a Bet365Scores website – all of which publish sports-based news, but don’t actually accept any real-money wagers.

One area where that hasn’t been successful, though, is stadium naming. In England, for example, grounds have carried betting names since Stoke City’s move to the bet365 Stadium back in 2016. No Italian ground currently carries a name like this, and none can under current law. It appears as though the betting companies and clubs haven’t managed to find a loophole around this yet, although even that remains to be seen, as the current government has indicated that it may, in the future, look to loosen and relax the current regulations surrounding it.

From Pirelli to Betsson: the Shift that Changed Italian Football’s Shirt Fronts