Fun88 Sponsorships and Ambassadors

Fun88 publishes its own list of partners, and it runs to eleven entries across football, basketball and esports, the earliest starting in 2010. Three English clubs sit on that list, alongside six individual ambassadors and one esports team. The pattern behind the choices is fairly readable: late-career or retired sports figures with international recognition, plus English clubs whose matches are broadcast across Asia every weekend. What the list does not contain is contract detail. The brand gives partner names and years, nothing more, so the shape of each agreement stays outside what anyone can verify from it.

Club partnerships in English football

Burnley came first, and twice. The two spells fell in periods when the club was moving between the Premier League and the Championship, which tells you something about the entry point: a smaller club, a lower price, and a route into English football before the bigger names arrived. The Tottenham and Newcastle agreements followed, and for seven seasons from 2017 the brand’s name was attached to two Premier League clubs at the same time.

The Tottenham deal, 2012 to 2024

Twelve years is a long run by sponsorship standards, and it covers most of the period Korean viewers were watching Tottenham closely. Son Heung-min joined in 2015 and stayed until 2025, captaining the side in his final seasons, and the club reached a Champions League final in 2019. A great deal of Korean football attention passed through those broadcasts. One point matters here and is easy to get wrong: the front of the Tottenham shirt in that period belonged to other companies, AIA from 2014 onward, so the logo was never the front-of-shirt sponsor. If you want the full chronology of the club’s commercial partners alongside the betting deal, the twelve seasons at Spurs are set out separately.

The Newcastle United deal, 2017 to 2025

Newcastle ran for eight seasons and ended in the same year as the Casillas ambassadorship. The brand describes it as a Premier League club partnership that raised international visibility, which is the usual commercial logic. It does not say where the logo appeared. Premier League clubs typically sell several betting-adjacent rights at once, including sleeve space, training kit, pitchside advertising and official or regional betting-partner status, often to different companies in different territories. Without the contract, naming the position would be a guess, so this guide leaves it unnamed.

Fun88 ambassadors

1. Robbie Fowler, 2014 to 2019. The Liverpool forward was the first long-running ambassador, overlapping with both Burnley spells and the early Tottenham years.
2. Steve Nash, 2015 to 2019. Two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, and the first signing aimed at basketball audiences rather than football ones.
3. Kobe Bryant, 2019 to 2020. One of the shortest listed ambassadorships, and the highest-profile name on the whole list.
4. Iker Casillas, 2022 to 2025. The Spain and Real Madrid goalkeeper, World Cup winner, signed after retirement.
5. Tony Parker, 2023 to 2024. A second NBA name, strong in both North American and French-speaking markets.
6. Andrés Iniesta, current ambassador. The most recent football signing, and the one still in place.

The logic of signing retired players is commercial rather than sporting. Active athletes in most major leagues face restrictions or reputational risk around gambling endorsements, and clubs often control their image rights. A retired player carries the same recognition with fewer of those constraints, usually at a lower cost than a shirt deal with a club. Basketball names such as Nash, Bryant and Parker also widen the reach beyond football, which suits a brand operating in several regions at once. None of this says anything about the product itself, and an ambassador is not a reviewer: the arrangement is paid promotion, and the player’s role ends there.

Esports: OG and Dota 2

One entry on the list is not a person or a club. OG, the Dota 2 team that won back-to-back titles at The International in 2018 and 2019, was sponsored from 2020 to 2022. Esports sponsorship works on a different audience profile: younger, largely online, concentrated around streaming platforms rather than broadcast television. For a betting brand the attraction is that esports matches generate continuous betting markets through periods when major football leagues are out of season. The partnership ended in 2022 and nothing has replaced it on the published list.

Premier League betting sponsors and the front-of-shirt ban

Gambling sponsorship in English football is changing, and the direction is one-way. Premier League clubs collectively agreed to stop selling front-of-shirt space to gambling brands from the 26/27 season, a self-imposed measure adopted ahead of wider regulatory pressure. The agreement is narrower than it sounds, though. It covers the front of the shirt and nothing else, so sleeve sponsorships, training-kit deals, pitchside boards, stadium branding and official or regional betting-partner titles all continue.

That context matters when you read a partnership list as evidence of anything beyond spending.

The useful questions sit elsewhere. Which company holds the licence, which regulator issued it and which territories are excluded are all matters of record rather than marketing, and they are covered in the licence section of this guide. The product side is separate again: what the sportsbook covers varies region by region, because each market gets its own localised lobby. For the shortest route through the whole picture, including the operator behind the name, start with the brand overview.