Football became the sport attracting the most investment from cryptocurrency businesses this season, with more than $243m paid out to organisations over the last year.
According to a report published on May 28 by Sport Quake, football made up 43% of all crypto and digital asset sponsorship for the 2024/25 season, growing the total amount of sponsorships by 64% year-over-year. Formula 1 (28%) and basketball (18%) took up the second and third spots respectively.
Since the start of the football season in August 2024, 20 new crypto deals have been announced worth a combined $130m annually. Some of these deals include Kraken’s sleeve sponsorship agreement with Tottenham Hotspur, Bitpanda’s deal with Paris Saint-Germain, and the historic Crypto.com title partnership with UEFA.
Becoming UEFA’s first-ever cryptocurrency partner for the Champions League represented a shift in changing attitudes towards the crypto and digital asset sector, after it rebounded from a market crash that significantly damaged its reputation across 2022 and 2023.
While Crypto.com will gain significant exposure as a partner of the UEFA Champions League, the most-watched football competition in Europe and most of the world, firms like Kraken are opting for shirt sponsorships to expand its brand.
The Sport Quake report highlighted shirt branding is the most common type of sponsorship agreement for crypto companies. Just over 35% of all football crypto exchange deals included shirt sponsorship, more than double of the 15% of deals that were in place the season before.
Perhaps unsurprising to many, 44% of all crypto football sponsorship agreements happen within Europe’s top five leagues; England’s Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, and France’s Ligue 1.
These European leagues remain the most-watched continentally and globally, with the Premier League continuing to expand its global reach across regions like Asia and North America, a bonus for the likes of Kraken who can grow its brand to new markets in association with Tottenham.
“At Kraken, our marketing research shows that over 75% of our core audience in Europe are passionate football fans,” said Mayur Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer at Kraken.
“Through our partnerships with top clubs like Tottenham and Atletico Madrid, we plan to bridge the worlds of football and crypto, offering meaningful experiences that resonate with fans and bring them closer to the core substance and value of crypto.”
The crypto market experienced a ‘crypto winter’ from 2022-2023, largely attributed to the high-profile collapses of FTX and TerraLuna.
As a result, some crypto businesses like DigitalBits were unable to make payments to Italian clubs Inter Milan and AS Roma, subsequently being dropped as a sponsoring partner. However, Inter has seemingly opened up its arms to the crypto sector once again.
The 20-time Scudetto winners signed two deals last season to reinforce its recommitment with the market, one with Gate.io as the club’s new sleeve shirt sponsor, and the other being with BlockDAG as the club’s first official blockchain partner.
When Insider Sport spoke to BlockDAG CEO, Andy Turner, in September 2024, he shared his thoughts on why football is becoming the predominant sport sponsorship avenue for a lot of digital asset companies, and why there has been renewed interest in the sector after a few years of turbulence.
He said: “Football is a massive industry, and touches the lives of more than a billion people. That said, the mainstream adoption of crypto will take time and relies on sustained crypto penetration in all areas of business, especially the financial industry. Football will certainly play a role in this.”
“The reason for the sponsorships happening now was driven by the fact that the football season has just started, so we wanted to get in from the beginning. Furthermore, these sponsorships are long-term relationships, so there was no need to ‘time’ the market.”
Outside of football, there were numerous crypto sponsorship deals being agreed across a slew of other sports, involving Formula 1, basketball, American football, tennis and esports.
The largest deals of note were Crypto.com’s partnership renewal with Formula 1, along with Gate.io, Coinbase, and Zoomex all entering F1 for the first time with deals with Red Bull, Aston Martin, and Haas, respectively.
Across the 2024 F1 season, crypto companies activated their partnerships in 24 Grand Prix’s across the globe, enabling them to expand their geographical reach and visibility to markets they may have not previously engaged with.
Crypto sponsorship spending in F1 has steadily increased from 2022-2025, with the current season seeing $174m paid out to F1 teams via sponsoring partnerships. There are currently six crypto-F1 team partnerships as of May 2025.
The crypto sector, much like F1, are both emerging disruptors in their respective fields. As crypto continues to become a financial disruptor in a bid to find new innovative ways to make payments, F1 has redefined storytelling to its audience with the F1: Drive to Survive series on Netflix, as well as wider broadcasting initiatives across continents.
Sport Quake provided deeper analysis of the crypto-F1 relationship, with both sectors boasting digitally-native, younger audiences. The report revealed that 42% of F1 fans are under the age of 35, while also garnering 97 million social media followers across all platforms.
If more crypto companies recognise the global reach F1 has, as well as a younger fanbase that is likely to engage with digital assets more, it may not be long before the sport takes over football as the reigning crypto champion of sports sponsorship.
