Chelsea Football Club has struck a £20mn shirt-sleeve sponsorship deal with a digital asset platform, as the Premier League side prepares to move on from the Roman Abramovich era.
WhaleFin, a platform for trading and lending cryptocurrencies, has agreed to sponsor the London club from next season, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The deal shows the commercial appeal of Chelsea as Abramovich awaits special approval from the UK government to complete a sale to a group of investors led by US financier Todd Boehly, who won a competitive auction last week.
Chelsea and WhaleFin agreed the deal in January, the month before Russia invaded Ukraine, the person said.
The war forced Abramovich to put the club up for sale and he was subsequently hit with sanctions. Chelsea is currently operating under a special licence that prevents the club from selling new merchandise and also includes a freeze on funds the club receives.
But such promotional deals show how football clubs are striking agreements with cryptocurrency platforms to increase their commercial revenues.
Premier League rival Manchester United agreed a training-kit sponsorship with blockchain company Tezos in February. The following month, reigning champions Manchester City announced a global partnership with crypto exchange OKX.
Chelsea and other clubs in the Premier League have a global reach through broadcast deals worth more than £10bn over the next three seasons and social media accounts with millions of followers. That scale has helped sports teams to increase sponsorship revenues through crypto partnerships.
Boehly’s group, which includes investment firm Clearlake Capital, Guggenheim Partners chief executive Mark Walter and Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, acquired Chelsea for £2.5bn, a sum that will be placed in a UK bank account and frozen.
The government has insisted that Abramovich cannot benefit from the proceeds, and the oligarch has pledged to donate the money to charity.
The group plans to invest a further £1.75bn in Chelsea.
The club is also seeking a new main shirt sponsor following the decision of telecoms group Three to suspend their partnership after the UK placed Abramovich under sanctions in March, the person said.
There is extra pressure on Chelsea to generate commercial revenue because its 40,000-capacity Stamford Bridge stadium is far smaller than the venues owned by major European rivals such as Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.
Chelsea’s commercial revenues totalled £153mn in the 2020-21 season, amounting to about 35 per cent of its total revenues of £434mn. The club made most of that from broadcast deals, which amounted to £273mn.
However, Abramovich bankrolled Chelsea for two decades after buying the club in 2003 for £140mn, acquiring top players to compete in and win the biggest trophies in the sport, including the elite Uefa Champions League and the English league title.
Singapore-headquartered Amber Group owns WhaleFin. Amber’s shareholders include Singapore’s Temasek investment group, Sequoia China, Pantera Capital, Tiger Global Management, Tru Arrow Partners and Coinbase Ventures.
Amber, which executes trades on behalf of clients, among other crypto services, raised $200mn from investors in February in a funding round that valued the company at $3bn.
WhaleFin is Amber’s consumer-facing app. The sponsorship deal was first reported by Sky News.
