New research: Cricket flooded with betting sponsorships after pandemic

The online betting industry has a long relationship with the sport, but the real boom began after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to research carried out by Play the Game, at least 165 sponsorships were agreed upon between betting companies and leading cricket teams, tournaments, or players between 2020 and the end of August 2025.

Table 1: A decade of cricket betting sponsorships

The research was undertaken using online sources and social media, but not all sponsorships are found here. Some, such as shirt deals or on hoardings, are only visible when games are shown on video or television. This means that the scale of betting sponsorship of cricket is likely to be even greater.

The rise of betting sponsorships in cricket

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has 12 full members and 96 associate members. In 2018, the ICC decreed that all international games played in the shortest format, T20, would be classed as full internationals. A global ranking system was created just for T20, and betting companies began to offer bets on many of these games between associate members, where integrity provisions are not so strong.

Soon, problems began to emerge. In countries where cricket is less established, finances are weak, and the pandemic exacerbated this weakness. As sports resumed after the pandemic, betting companies offering bets on lower-level games that are more susceptible to manipulation were able to set up an increasing number of sponsorships across the sport. 

ICC rules on betting sponsorships at the international level were not clear, so in 2023, the council clarified its rules to allow betting companies to sponsor teams.

“Noting that several members would be restricted from using betting logos in their country, and on the basis that several members had engaged with betting companies for sponsorship, it was felt that the members should have the right to determine for themselves if betting logos should be used in bilateral and domestic cricket,” Clive Hitchcock, secretary to the ICC’s Chief Executives Committee, wrote in a document to national administrators.

Subsequently, the surge in cricket sponsorships gained pace, and Play the Game's research revealed 31 agreements from the first eight months of 2025 alone.

Caribbean sponsorships are the way to bettors in other countries

Over the last decade, the majority of sponsorships from the betting industry have ended up in the Caribbean, where countries compete jointly as the West Indies at the international level. During this period, they have attracted 34 sponsorships, including 32 in the last five years.

Table 2: Cricket betting sponsorships by country

Most of these Caribbean deals are not aimed at local bettors, but those watching the matches in the Indian subcontinent in countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Here, cricket is the dominant sport in terms of players and viewers, but betting is largely illegal for social and cultural reasons.

A massive black market for betting, dominated by cricket, has existed for years and has been fuelled by the increasingly widespread availability of online betting. 

Some countries try to stop online betting by geo-blocking betting websites. India, for example, blocked more than 1,500 betting websites between 2022 and June 2025 but most smartphone users can easily access these websites using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which bypasses domestic geo-blocking. 

With sports sponsorship by betting operators also banned, betting companies are constantly looking for opportunities to gain the attention of potential customers.

Media promotions could be one such avenue, but they were clamped down on by national authorities, such as India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, which has repeatedly warned print, electronic, and digital media about promoting online betting platforms. 

One of the next steps was to engage with cricket competitions, teams and players who will be seen playing by potential bettors in India and neighbouring countries where betting is also banned

Table 3: Cricket betting sponsorships by type

This can explain the proliferation of deals in the Caribbean with well-known former players whose views are sought as pundits, such as West Indies player Kieron Pollard, who is an ambassador for 1xBet.

Former West Indies player Kieron Pollard has agreed to become an ambassador for 1xBet. Screenshot from Kieron Pollard's profile on X.

Another popular avenue is to make sponsorship deals with entire series of games as they provide a route to customers in countries where betting is banned. For example, India’s tours of the Caribbean in 2023 and Zimbabwe in 2024 were sponsored by BetBricks7 and 1xBet respectively as television coverage of these games provided a route to potential bettors in India.

These contradictions are common. Stake.com sponsors the new Major League Cricket competition in the USA even though the company has been hit with lawsuits for illegally offering online betting in some US states, such as Arizona and California. 

Streams of English county matches are watched from afar

Many English County teams have deals with Dafabet and stream their matches for free on YouTube. These games are popular in the Indian subcontinent, and the comments section shows how betting is being discussed even on games watched by relatively few viewers.

Betting companies do not break any rules in the UK if they enter into sponsorships that can be watched by people gambling on the black market in the Indian sub-continent, but their behaviour is questionable in other ways.

In 2023, Dafabet’s owners Vivaro had to pay a £337,631 settlement to the UK Gambling Commission after a review found that the company had ‘broken licence conditions designed to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing’ and had not ‘interacted with customers in a way that minimised the risk of problem gambling.’ 

AskGamblers helps bettors with complaints against betting operators and four of the five biggest offenders – Dafabet, 1xBet, BC.Game and Stake.com – are all major sponsors of cricket.

Offshore licenses do not protect against illegal betting

The betting companies sponsoring cricket have licences, but typically they are offshore certificates from jurisdictions such as Curaçao, a Dutch island in the Caribbean, or Anjouan, an island in the Indian Ocean that is part of the Comoros.

The operators themselves claim these ‘licences’ provide a form of reassurance for bettors and governments in countries where betting is either illegal, or local regulations have not caught up with the explosion in online betting.

The Macolin Convention - the only rule of international law on the manipulation of sports competitions – however, classifies “any sports betting activity whose type or operator is not allowed under the applicable law of the jurisdiction where the consumer is located” as “illegal sports betting.” 

These illegal betting operators do not cooperate with sports bodies such as the ICC to report suspicious betting that can indicate manipulation, and their owners are hidden through a maze of offshore shell companies. 

For example, Wolf777 has a licence from Curaçao, where its licence shows the owner as GIT Operations NV, and the only director from a corporate services provider, EM Group. Crickex, which focuses on Bangladesh and India, also has a Curaçao licence and is registered in Cyprus.

Illegal betting is the “number one factor fuelling corruption in sports” according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which in 2023 estimated that up to 1.7 trillion US dollars is wagered on illicit betting markets controlled by organised crime.

Privately-run tournaments add to illegal betting problems

The ICC is focused on growing cricket around the world via T20, which is the game’s shortest format and takes around three hours to play, in contrast to test matches that can last five days.

The brevity of T20 makes these games easier to stage for national associations as well as operators looking to cash in by recruiting well-known players to play in privately run tournaments. Big-name players attract viewers, particularly in the cricket-mad Indian subcontinent, and this brings in advertising from betting companies.

Some of these privately-run T20 tournaments can be badly run and offer a route into the game for corruptors, warned Alex Marshall, the head of the ICC’s Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU). 

After retiring in 2024, he told ESPN: “The threat to the game is corruptors won't go away while there is always money to be made and they will look for weakness in the system to get in.”

Steve Richardson, former coordinator of investigations at the ACU, told Play the Game: “The ICC has 108 members and [betting] is often the only money they can get in terms of sponsorship, and they would push back. If you banned it, you are taking that money away, and you have to be very clear what your rationale is.”

Table 4: Most prolific betting sponsors

The surge in illegal betting sponsorship has grown in tandem with a new format, T10, which only lasts around 90 minutes. During the pandemic, T10 provided one of the few cricket tournaments available to watch – and bet on - when a competition was staged in Vanuatu and funded by BetBarter.

Subsequently, there has been a rise in privately operated tournaments set up as little more than vehicles for illegal betting. Organisers are theoretically expected to monitor betting markets for signs of suspicious movements, but problems with manipulation have been manifest.

Three players were banned from the Abu Dhabi T10 last year, and the ICC’s ACU launched another investigation after allegations that players purposely bowled badly in the 2024 edition. The ACU also had to launch a corruption probe in Zimbabwe after similar allegations in the 2024 Zim Afro T10.

These tournaments are all sponsored by illegal betting companies which also offer bets on the matches. Over the last five years, Play the Game identified 24 sponsorships between illegal betting companies and T10 competitions or franchises including nine in the Abu Dhabi T10. 

“When someone is funding it and putting money on the line and there’s a [betting operator] with a licence with no regulation, there’s very little anyone can do,” says Steve Richardson of the growing plethora of privately-run franchise competitions.

The provenance of these betting companies can be dubious. For example, betting operator LB88Sports.com was announced as sponsor of the Vegas Vikings franchise team in the Max60 T10 in the Cayman islands this year but the website of that name is up for sale.

This infiltration of cricket by dubious illegal betting companies goes far deeper and to even more troubling levels.

Close links between betting companies and porn websites

Illegal betting companies are also tying up sponsorship with players and Play the Game’s research turned up 35 deals including 33 agreed in the last five years.

Several recently retired Australian cricketing legends have been promoting a Russian bookmaker that has flooded PornHub with branded content, much of it promoting incest. 

The bookie, 1Win, is the shirt sponsor of Australia's representative team in the new World Championship of Legends 2025 Champions competition, an exhibition series featuring former big name players.

The World Championship of Legends has entered into a sponsorship deal with 1Win that is closely associated to contents on PornHub. Screenshot from Australia Champion's profile on Instagram.

The 1Win brand can be found on a seemingly endless amount of content on PornHub. In some videos, porn actresses are wearing items of clothing - such as a balaclava or a swimsuit - with the 1Win logo. Many more feature the 1Win brand as a watermark, along with taglines like Crypto Casino #1 and Promo Code: 1WINPORN.

Many porn actresses on the site include the 1Win logo in their banner image. A common theme in these videos is incest between step relatives, whilst another video features a uniformed schoolgirl sleeping with her teacher, which could be construed as child abuse material.

More than just branding, there is even one video in which a porn actress explains to her lover how 1Win works, before sleeping with him.

In the deeply conservative Indian subcontinent, sex sells. Adult film star Eva Elfie is an ambassador for 1xBet, which is blacklisted in a number of countries and was banned from the UK in 2019 after an investigation showed the site offering bets on children’s game and operating a pornhub. 

Stake.com, which has a licence in Curaçao, was forced to quit the United Kingdom earlier this year after a British Gambling Commission review of its practices, which included using an adult film star, Bonnie Blue, for advertising.

New ways to hit the eyeballs of bettors

Illegal betting companies, whose money is flooding into cricket in return for exposure, are constantly seeking new avenues to elude regulation and gain access to customers.

Some operators began running ‘sports news’ websites that operate as a gateway to their betting websites, such as 1xBet’s 1xBat News or Wolf777 News, before regulators intervened. 

In 2024, the Peshawar High Court banned the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) from agreeing sponsorship deals with betting companies running these ‘proxy websites’ and India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting warned social media influencers to stop promoting illegal betting websites. 

Other routes to customers for illegal betting firms range from sponsoring illegal streams of the Indian Premier League (IPL) to offering QR codes linked to their betting channels on Whats App and Telegram. QR codes can be used to encode the link to a website URL. The camera on a smartphone will interpret the data in the QR code and take the owner to  the website of a betting company.

Betting companies chasing customers in the Indian subcontinent also use AI to advertise alongside web searches for legitimate websites. 

Adverts for Linebet, the sponsor of England player Dawid Malan and the Zim Afro T10, appears alongside searches on Google for India’s Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development. Similarly, Mega Casino World advertises alongside web searches for India’s Sambalpur University and Melbet to the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) responded to this promotion of illegal betting by launching an investigation under the 2002 Money Laundering Act and summoned Google and Meta (the owner of Facebook) to answer questions in New Delhi on July 28.

Google attended, but Meta is understood not to have done so. As part of the probe, the ED is also investigating sports figures, celebrities and influencers involved in promoting illegal betting operators.

Illegal betting companies are also hijacking livestreams of tournaments at every level of cricket. Police in Bengaluru in India reportedly filed a legal action earlier this year against 1xBet for illegally livestreaming the ICC Champions Trophy.

1xBet is also among offshore operators, along with Linebet and 888Starz, that appear to be showing the Steelbird Cricket League, an Indian-based business league. This streaming is blocked in India, but, like all offshore illegal operators, it is easily accessible to bettors anywhere in the world using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Betting on fantasy cricket games is allowed

India’s approach to regulating betting differs from many other countries. While games of chance -sports betting -are largely banned, games of skill are permitted, including online fantasy sports competitions that allow contestants to win money.

Fantasy cricket games are advertised widely across the Indian subcontinent with one of the largest, Dream11, on the shirts of the Indian national team.

Fantasy cricket allows players to compete to win money on actual games. Predicting how players might perform as part of a fantasy game is interpreted as a game of skill. 

In these fantasy competitions, players can choose cricketers from any level. This has included T20 internationals played by associate members in countries where the game is a minor pursuit and amateur. 

Courtsiders have long attended sports events to try to get information on games before betting companies can update their odds, and players of fantasy sports also do this. 

This offers another danger to cricket’s integrity, as corruptors can seek to potentially influence games to win on fantasy cricket as well as through betting, much of which take place on illegal sites that do not co-operate with the game’s authorities.

As India and neighbouring countries in the subcontinent grapple for solutions, illegal betting companies will continue to look for new avenues to find customers, and cricket looks set to be their main vehicle.

Additional reporting by Jack Kerr