Part of our series on ASA rulings relating to children’s appeal in gambling marketing.

In October 2025, the ASA upheld a complaint against a Betway pre‑roll YouTube ad showing a Chelsea FC stadium experience that prominently featured the club’s logo on scarves, shirts, wall displays and backdrops. Betway argued that CAP guidance (Guidance) allows “identifiers” that specifically reference the subject of the gambling activity, such as a team logo, and that the ad was targeted to users aged 25+ who were already logged into YouTube. The ASA accepted in principle that a single, standalone identifier may be permitted if used purely as a reference point. However, it drew a clear line between a simple identifier and the extensive, immersive use of club branding within a fan‑experience narrative.

The decision turned on two points of reasoning. Firstly, football retains inherent strong appeal to under‑18s; featuring a club logo in a stadium‑tour setting was likely to strongly appeal to Chelsea‑supporting under-18s and to under-18s who have an interest in football more broadly. Secondly, the ad ran on YouTube – a platform that relies on self-verification of age, which means however targeted the ad may be, it will always be at risk of a strong appeal to children ruling – this meant that despite the targeting parameters selected, no exception was available for robust audience verification.

The ASA reiterated its now-familiar position: where content is likely to have strong appeal to under-18s, only robust age verification that effectively excludes under‑18s “for all intents and purposes” is sufficient; standard platform age‑gating or demographic targeting does not meet the required accuracy threshold.

The lesson from this ruling is that operators cannot rely on contractual logo rights or general audience targeting to justify heavy use of football club branding in social environments. A minimal identifier may be acceptable (for example, a small team logo used once to identify the subject of a bet); whereas a fan-centric, logo‑heavy execution is not, unless the relevant platform implements robust age‑verification. Of course, there are numerous partnerships between gambling operators and football clubs, and since all current footballers were held to be of strong appeal, marketing teams want to be more creative in their campaigns. This ruling is, therefore, an important one for those stakeholders.

• Kwiff: Lewis Hamilton
• Sky Bet / Gary Neville
• RTSB: Match Bingo
• Midnite
• Betway: Lewis Hamilton
• Key takeaways for operators
• Back to overview