Back in July, we signed one of the biggest Swedish sports sponsorships to date, namely the principal sponsorship of the Swedish elite football leagues, Allsvenskan and Superettan. This is a unique partnership, as it’s the first time in history we can sponsor Swedish activities, due the recent gambling license legislation passed by the Swedish government
At Kindred Group, we are extremely excited about this partnership as it gives us the chance to work closely with the football association and its clubs to further develop the sport. Together as partners, our aim is to lift Swedish football and to support the advancement of Allsvenskan to become one of the top leagues in Europe. As the sponsorship is first starting in January 2020, we have a long ‘pre-season’ and thus time to get to know our new partners, which consists of Swedish Elite Football Association (SEF) and its 32-member clubs.
We have in the past years made big investments to become a fully data-driven and scientific gambling operator. Over 100 people are currently working in the big data and data analytics space, focused around cutting-edge machine learning and prediction models. Through our digital expertise, we believe that we have a great opportunity to support Swedish football’s transition in becoming more digital and to enhance the football fans’ costumer experience. The partnership is equally valuable for us as it allows us to exclusively leverage data from SEF to further develop our product. This is particularly beneficial as product differentiation becomes increasingly important in the competitive Swedish market. By understanding the customers’ needs, and provide them with a personalised and tailored experience, we believe we can efficiently active and retain them. We will also explore other interesting opportunities, such as how we can gamify the game to provide an even better customer experience.
Match fixing is a threat to both sports and gambling companies because the reduced confidence in sports integrity weakens the interest of not only watching the match, but in engaging with it through betting. As the first audit company to specialise in sports integrity and ethics, Ethisport completed a sports integrity audit of Kindred last year. Considering that the very best sporting organisations in the world score 80/100, we are very pleased with a score of 70/100, which was also much higher than the industry average. We believe that the key to success is full transparency and cooperation between local regulators, sports and gambling companies. Unibet wants to be an active partner to SEF, by working closely with the sports clubs so we unitedly can fight against match fixing. Talent development and grassroot related projects are other initiatives we look forward to working with, as it’s a great opportunity to give back to the football communities across Sweden.
Learn more about the partnership by reading the press release here.
