Spanish gambling sponsorship ban to begin next season

Existing betting sponsorships will be allowed to continue until the end of the current season.

Spain.- Spain has confirmed a transition period for the introduction of its ban on gambling sponsorship in football to allow existing contracts to complete this season.

Alberto Garzon, Spain’s Consumer Affairs Minister, has signed an order that will bring the ban on gambling sponsorship into effect from next September.

Existing sponsorship agreements will be allowed to run for the rest of the season, but no new agreements may be signed, Garzon said.

The decision to allow a transition period will be welcomed by football clubs who feared the impact of an immediate ban, which would leave them scrambling to find new sponsors for the current season already underway.

La Liga president Javier Tebas has predicted that the ban would cost Spain’s top-tier clubs around €90m in sponsorship.

Clubs continued to sign new sponsorship deals for the current season despite warnings that the new legislation was due to be passed in October.

Spain’s Royal Decree on Advertising also imposes restrictions on gambling advertising across all media channels including a limit on TV adverts to between 1am and 5am.

Spain now plans to create a nationwide self-exclusion registry covering all of the country’s autonomous communities.

A recent report shows that last year gambling operators in Spain increased their advertising spend by 10.6 per cent.