Norwich’s BK8 PR disaster was an embarrassment for a club used to the moral high ground
“I really have such a hope to achieve here something that will contribute to the whole of football, to show that it isn’t all about money,” said Norwich City joint owner, Delia Smith.
Those words were spoken in the middle of May on the club’s official All In Yellow podcast after Norwich were crowned Championship winners and sealed another ticket to ride the Premier League. They were also meant more in the context of transfer budgets, clubs not spending beyond their means, and a focus on continual growth over short-term survival.
So much of the angst surrounding Norwich this week comes down to the club failing against their own sentiment.
On Monday, Norwich unveiled obscure Asian gambling company BK8 as their primary partner and shirt sponsor for next season — a deal worth an impressive and welcome £5 million to the club.
It took minutes for supporters to find highly sexualised images of young women in the company’s marketing across various social media platforms. The Instagram account of a BK8 “ambassador” with more than a quarter of a million followers also linked directly to hardcore pornography, as The Athletic revealed later that day.
There was a temptation from the club to ride out the resulting uproar from fans — individually and through supporters’ groups — and negative coverage. All-night discussions over how best to rectify the situation included options such as gifting the shirt sponsorship to charities and making adult shirts without BK8’s logo available to buy. The expectation that Norwich City Women would wear the same kit as the men’s team became an impossibility.
In the end, the only way to truly move forward was clear: to cancel the sponsorship altogether. That decision was reached on Wednesday afternoon after an emergency board meeting, with both Norwich and BK8 agreeing to cancel the contract with no further penalty — other than Norwich’s loss of £5 million that they had budgeted to receive.
There is minimal impact on Norwich’s new kit for next season. The shirts are produced overseas with the sponsor’s logo printed after they have arrived in the UK. Fortunately for Norwich, that latter process was yet to take place.
It was either naive or negligent that Norwich had not thoroughly checked out their new partner, and those involved have since endured some of the toughest days in their careers. There is nothing anyone outside the club can say that they won’t have realised or felt for themselves.
Equally, every job comes with responsibility and, especially in such a public environment, that responsibility is taken lightly at your own peril.
The curiosity is that Norwich were only looking for a new shirt sponsor this season because they ended their deal a year early with another Asian gambling company, Dafabet. That club-record deal — worth in excess of £5 million per season — began in 2019 when Norwich were previously promoted to the Premier League.
It is illogical that Dafabet, who currently sponsor Celtic and previously Sunderland, would have just given up on their own Premier League return. The Athletic understands that there were already some concerns over Norwich continuing their association with Dafabet in particular, which contributed to the end of that deal. That also raises questions over why there wasn’t more care taken when agreeing to work with BK8.
BK8’s marketing strategy meant it represented much more than simply a betting company. The result, however, is that two issues are now inextricably linked in the eyes of supporters.
Dr James Noyes, a lifelong Norwich fan, senior fellow of the Social Market Foundation think-tank and author of a major report on gambling reform, tells The Athletic: “This is a welcome move and it is good to see the club put principles above profit but one look at Dafabet’s Dafadolls shows that the problem is bigger than just Norwich City and BK8.
“The white-label system that allowed this to happen needs a total overhaul — and should be seen as a priority as part of the government’s gambling review.”
Gambling company Dafabet, based in the Philippines, were Norwich’s primary sponsor from July 2019 to June 2021 (Photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
Dafabet’s Dafadolls is a standalone marketing website offering “sexy videos” and images. An English-language version of the site was accessible on Monday but by Thursday, had been taken down.
The “white label” process gives UK market access to foreign gambling firms that don’t necessarily follow UK gambling laws, some of which The Athletic recently revealed may have links to organised crime and money laundering in Asia.
Norwich knew that having a third successive gambling firm as their shirt sponsor — a run that began with Leo Vegas in 2018 — was already a contentious point given Norwich’s consistent and proud belief in their community and moralistic values. The balance between living within your means and generating maximum revenue that fits into those values is fine.
Those values are now clearly cherished by Norwich supporters locally, as well as those who follow the club from afar.
Norwich have already begun their search for a replacement shirt sponsor and primary partner. It will almost certainly not be another betting firm, although it would be impossible to say that such a sponsorship will not happen in future — or whether future government legislation would actually allow it.
Insurance giant Aviva, which is partly based in Norwich, was the last non-gambling firm to feature on the front of the club’s shirts; a partnership that lasted more than a decade before the company ended the relationship.
Football can do funny things to people’s perception of money: a £5 million hole can sound like nothing, especially given the hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue thrown at Premier League clubs. For Norwich, that amount effectively equates to the transfer fee for a new signing this summer — or, to put it another way, a £250 hike on the cost of 20,000 season tickets.
A new shirt sponsor will offset that shortfall but only by a degree. Norwich’s eventual loss will amount to seven figures; it’s about where on the scale it finishes.
While the initial situation has been rectified and there is both a financial need and social desire to move on, it remains to be seen what the longer-term effects prove to be. Such situations can either build stronger working relationships or break them beyond repair.
The episode asks a question of the current Norwich board of directors. Every chief executive — or, in Norwich’s case, their current executive committee made up of chief operating officer Ben Kensell, sporting director Stuart Webber, plus business and project director Zoe Ward — needs a boss.
Be it BK8’s sponsorship or the 2019-20 membership scheme that caused so much displeasure among supporters, both needed board approval before reaching supporters. For all the failures of due diligence or misjudgements of process along the way, that final check has also failed. Most Premier League clubs have a boardroom boss that may have asked the right questions at the final hurdle — this could have saved Norwich a lot of money and even more goodwill.
In reality, Norwich could have picked any number of gambling companies in the world that would not have generated the sort of PR disaster they have faced this week. But also, other Premier League clubs continue to be sponsored by gambling firms that have and do operate in similar ways to those rejected at Carrow Road.
Norwich have spent a lot of time building their values and culture to peddle the narrative that the club cares about doing things the right way, taking the high ground, and placing a high value on its role in the community. It has fostered genuine pride that goes beyond each match result; bygone values in the modern era.
For all that Norwich got it wrong in the first place with BK8, supporters have now bought into that culture to the point that they feel able to police their own club by it.
That shows Norwich are indeed capable of much more than their rivals and maybe this will be another step closer to achieving something that may contribute to the whole of football — to show that in the end, it isn’t all about money.
(Top photo: Darren Eadie (left) and Ben Kensell, Norwich City’s chief operating officer, pictured unveiling BK8 as Norwich’s new sponsor; Matthew Usher/Norwich City FC)
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