In brief
- Players from English soccer team Watford F.C. will wear Dogecoin shirts in the new Premier League season.
- The sponsor is Stake.com, a crypto sports betting site.
- Watford was previously sponsored by another sports betting site, Sportsbet.io, that put Bitcoin on the players’ shirts.
Players from English soccer team Watford F.C. will wear Dogecoin on their shirts this season, according to British sports outlet The Athletic. Dogecoin will appear on all three Watford shirts.
The appearance of the meme coin is paid for by sports betting site and crypto casino Stake.com. The deal is worth at least £700,000 ($970,500) and will be paid in cryptocurrency, reported The Athletic.
To create some buzz about the partnership, Stake.com also plans to give away 10 million DOGE (worth $2 million).
Dogecoin has never appeared in high-profile sports events in Britain. But it’s not uncommon for the Shiba Inu to make its way into sports stadiums.
The coin’s ardent supporters have sponsored athletes and sports events several times since 2014, when Dogecoin holders coordinated on Reddit to sponsor NASCAR driver Josh Wise and sponsored Jamaica’s Winter Olympics bobsled team.
From NASCAR to the NBA: Sports Loves Dogecoin
This week, the NBA's Dallas Mavericks made Dogecoin holders happy by announcing the team will accept the meme-based cryptocurrency for tickets and merchandise. This isn’t the first time the 14th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has played a role in the sports world. From auto racing to ice sports, DOGE just keeps popping up. Olympics In 2014, the Jamaican two-man bobsled team was having trouble getting to the Winter Olympics, not because it hadn’t qualified but because it didn’t have the mon...
The Stake.com deal is not Watford’s first crypto sponsorship.
In the 2019-2020 soccer season, the soccer team wore Bitcoin shirts to promote the cryptocurrency. That was part of a deal with another sports betting site, Sportsbet.io.
Spencer Field, a Watford F.C. spokesperson, told Decrypt at the time that there is a “lengthy and ongoing cryptocurrency discussion” on the Watford F.C. forum. The only evidence of that was Watford fans shilling EOS on a Watford F.C. cryptocurrency thread three years earlier.
Today, the forum is not home to discussion about Dogecoin. But in a thread created after the partnership with Stake.com was announced on July 22, some fans speculated that the payment could have been made in Dogecoin.
Watford FC has branded the Bitcoin logo on its players' kits. Do Watford fans care?
Yesterday, CCN ran a story that was headlined “Bitcoin Logo Scores Premier League Exposure to Millions Globally.” The piece was about Watford FC, a Premier League club, which is now branding the Bitcoin logo on its players’ uniforms, at the behest of a crypto-friendly gambling sponsor, Sportsbet.io. The cryptocommentariat, as usual, were euphoric. “Smart move for Sportsbet,” tweeted Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, sagely. “If they used their own logo, I wouldn't be retweeting for them,” “$BTC, just...
“It is a gamble for a club with somewhat ropey finances,” one fan wrote about the club’s decision to accept the sponsorship payment in crypto shortly after they posted a $35 million loss. Does the club hope that the Dogecoin sponsorship will send them to the moon?
