GVC Holdings’ flagship sports betting brand Bwin has signed a new betting partnership with Italian football powerhouses Inter Milan.
On Tuesday, GVC proudly announced that Bwin had inked a three-year deal to become the official betting partner of FC Internazionale, more popularly known as Inter. This marks the first time the storied football club has inked a betting partnership with any operator, as the club’s former owner Massimo Moratti was vehemently opposed to tie-ups with gambling companies.
The deal will see Bwin provide in-play odds on the LED perimeter boards at Inter’s San Siro stadium, while the Bwin brand will also get plenty of exposure via the club’s digital properties and social media channels. Bwin will also provide Inter with a hefty chunk of cash, the precise amount of which went undisclosed in the official announcement.
Bwin Italia board member Moreno Marasco said it was “a privilege” to have popped Inter’s betting partnership cherry, as it fits with Bwin’s strategy of partnering with clubs that “compete at the pinnacle of international football.”
Inter’s chief revenue officer Michael Gandler stopped counting Bwin’s stacks of euros long enough to say the two parties were “united by the desire to develop and achieve at the highest levels.”
In other Bwin sponsorship news, the company’s as-yet-unlaunched Russian operation sponsored a pre-season hockey tournament in Sochi earlier this month. Bwin Russia CEO Dmitry Sergeyev called the Sochi Hockey Open 2017 deal the next step in the company “systematically moving along the path of development” ahead of its scheduled launch in September.
In June, GVC announced that it had teamed up with Russian-licensed bookie Digital Betting to formally launch the Bwin brand in Russia. But anyone expecting Bwin to go on a spending spree to get its brand emblazoned across Russian football jerseys is in for a disappointment.
In July, Sergeyev said Bwin.ru did eventually aim to get its logo on one or two Russian Premier League jerseys, “but certainly not this season.” Sergeyev said the company wouldn’t make any major sponsorship moves until it sees how Russian punters respond to the brand’s launch and the country’s overall betting market develops.
