Three-Year Sky Sports Deal Puts IG in Front of Premier League Viewers
IG Group is taking one of its biggest UK marketing bets into Premier League football, signing a three-season sponsorship of Sky Sports’ live coverage as the trading and investing company spends more heavily to acquire mainstream customers.
The agreement, announced by Sky Media on Aug. 21, makes IG an official co-sponsor of Sky Sports Premier League coverage from the 2026/27 season. Its branding will run across every live Premier League match shown by Sky for the next three seasons, covering television, streaming, digital and social platforms.
Sky Sports broadcasts at least 215 Premier League matches a season, more than 80% of the games shown live in the UK. The package also extends to the Sky Sports app, website and social channels, as well as broadcasts in pubs and other venues across the UK and Ireland.
IG joins a co-sponsor roster that includes Guinness, Coca-Cola, Uber Eats, EA Sports and bet365. It is the only investing and trading platform in the group.
Sky describes the package as “whistle-to-whistle” sponsorship. Its marketing material for the inventory says sponsors receive branding around roughly 215 live games as well as Premier League programming, digital video and display placements. Sky says its Premier League content reaches more than 17 million adults a month across platforms.
Neither IG nor Sky Media disclosed how much the company is paying. IG described the partnership as its biggest sports sponsorship investment to date.
“The Premier League is one of the world’s biggest sporting competitions,” IG senior vice president of marketing Elise Ash said, adding that the arrangement puts the company in front of millions of football fans throughout the season.
The spending comes as IG is already putting considerably more money behind customer acquisition.
Advertising and marketing expenditure reached £75.4 million in the six months ended June 30, up 51% from £50 million a year earlier. Total revenue increased 18% to £642.8 million, meaning marketing consumed nearly 12% of revenue compared with roughly 9% in the comparable period.
Management said the higher spending helped lift first trades by 107%. On an organic basis, first trades were up 74%, and IG said customer-acquisition payback remained below six months, with lifetime value comfortably exceeding acquisition cost. The company plans to raise marketing spending further as a percentage of revenue.
The strongest UK and Ireland customer growth has been on the investing side rather than IG’s traditional leveraged-trading business.
The region recorded 51,500 first trades in the first half. Stock trading and investments supplied 43,500 of those, including 23,600 from Freetrade, while CFDs and other over-the-counter derivatives produced 8,900.
That mix makes the Premier League campaign particularly relevant to IG’s efforts to broaden its identity beyond leveraged trading.
Stock trading and investment revenue reached £41.9 million across the group in the first half, up 54%, including £9.8 million from Freetrade. OTC derivatives remained much larger, generating £460.5 million of net trading revenue, but the newer investment businesses are supplying much of the customer-account growth.
The timing also overlaps with a change in football sponsorship.
Premier League clubs agreed in 2023 to remove gambling companies from the front of matchday shirts after the 2025/26 season. The 2026/27 campaign is the first played under that agreement. The rule does not prohibit gambling advertising elsewhere around Premier League coverage, which is why bet365 can remain among Sky’s broadcast sponsors.
Financial-services companies, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly visible in football.
The FCA warned UK clubs in June to conduct proper due diligence before signing financial-services sponsors, particularly when dealing with unauthorised overseas trading or crypto companies. It said clubs could face legal, money-laundering and reputational risks if they promoted firms without appropriate UK permissions.
IG itself is FCA-authorised, while its agreement is with Sky Media rather than an individual football club.
The deal also comes during a broader increase in football spending by investment platforms. XTB has recently signed three-season partnerships with Olympique Lyonnais and FC Porto, putting its branding on club shirts and other assets.
IG is simultaneously deploying capital much further from UK football. On July 30, it agreed to acquire US prediction-markets and fantasy-sports company Underdog for consideration of up to about $1.3 billion, another piece of a wider push to expand beyond its traditional CFD franchise.
IG Is Buying an Audience, Not Just Advertising Space
The easiest way to read the Sky deal is as another financial company putting its logo around football.
The more useful reading is that IG is paying for repeated access to an audience it wants to turn into investors.
That distinction explains both the scale and the timing.
For decades, IG was principally known among people who already traded markets. CFDs, spread betting and other leveraged products brought in customers who actively sought out trading platforms. Freetrade changes that equation. Stocks, ETFs and investment accounts can be marketed to a much wider population that may never consider itself a group of “traders.”
Premier League football gives IG exactly that population.
Someone watching Manchester United against Liverpool does not need to know what a CFD is. They only need to recognise IG often enough that the company enters the shortlist when they eventually want to buy shares or open an investment account.
The first-trade numbers already show why management might be willing to spend aggressively. Only 8,900 of the 51,500 UK and Ireland first trades came from OTC products during the first half. Stock trading and investing delivered almost five times as many.
So although derivatives still generate most of the money, investment products increasingly appear to be the customer-acquisition funnel.
That creates an interesting tension in IG’s economics.
Marketing expenditure grew 51% while revenue grew 18%. Normally, that gap would invite questions about whether acquisition costs are rising too quickly. IG’s response is that the customers are paying back the cost in less than six months and generating lifetime value comfortably above acquisition costs.
The Premier League deal tests that claim at much greater scale.
Unlike paid search advertising, where a company can track an individual click and account opening, broadcast sponsorship spends heavily on brand recognition whose return is harder to attribute precisely. Sky can provide audience numbers, but IG ultimately needs those viewers to become funded and active customers.
The presence of bet365 in the same sponsorship group makes the timing especially interesting.
Premier League football has not suddenly become free of gambling advertising because shirt-front betting logos disappeared. The commercial inventory has simply changed. Broadcast, perimeter, sleeve and other sponsorship categories remain available.
Financial platforms are competing for some of that same attention.
That creates opportunity, but also scrutiny. Football viewers are a mass consumer audience, and investment products can involve financial losses just as gambling products do. The FCA’s June warning to clubs shows regulators are already paying closer attention to the companies using football’s credibility to market financial services.
For an established regulated company such as IG, that scrutiny may actually strengthen the value of the slot. If clubs and broadcasters become more cautious about financial sponsors, authorisation and brand history become barriers for smaller offshore competitors.
IG is therefore buying more than millions of impressions.
It is buying a place beside household consumer brands at the moment its business is trying to become one itself.
Whether that works will not be measured by how often the logo appears before kick-off. It will be measured by whether IG can keep converting a rapidly growing marketing bill into investment customers cheaply enough to justify spending even more next season.
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