Betfred Ends Super League Sponsorship As UK Gambling Tax Bite Deepens

Betfred's decision to end its Super League sponsorship isn't an isolated retreat, it's the clearest sign yet that the UK's tax hike is reshaping the relationship between gambling and British sport. 

Betfred will not be renewing its Super League title sponsorship beyond the 2026 season, bringing to a close one of the longest-running commercial partnerships in British sport. The deal, first struck in 2017 and expanded into a record-breaking three-year renewal in 2023, has covered the men's, women's and wheelchair competitions, the Challenge Cup, and shirt sponsorship of all three England national sides.^[1]

Owner Fred Done said the company was ending the tie-up "with a very heavy heart," pointing to the cumulative weight of last year's Budget and ongoing wage inflation as the deciding factors. It's the same language Betfred used in July, when it opened a consultation to close 132 shops and cut more than 600 jobs^[2], a move Fred Done reportedly described as feeling "like killing your own babies.”

Rhodri Jones, interim CEO of the Rugby Football League, thanked Betfred for its near decade of support. Behind the scenes, Rugby League Commercial, the body that manages Super League's commercial rights, is understood to already be exploring replacement sponsors, though neither side has confirmed a formal end date beyond "the close of this contracted term.”^[3]

A tax rise built to bite

The Autumn Budget is doing exactly what the industry warned it would. 

General betting duty rose to 25%, and remote gaming duty nearly doubled, climbing from 21% to 40% when it came into force in April. 

For an operator like Betfred, with a sizeable UK retail and online footprint, that's not a marginal cost, it's a structural one, and it's already showing up across the operator's whole marketing book, not just rugby league. Betfred has also chosen to hold onto its horse racing sponsorships, including its title backing of all five British Classics, at the same time as it steps back from rugby league, so this isn't a wholesale exit from sport, it's a reallocation toward the properties Betfred judges deliver the clearest return.

Betfred is far from alone. Entain confirmed in the same window that Coral would end its 52-year sponsorship of the Coral Cup at the Cheltenham Festival, one of the most storied ties in UK horse racing, citing the need to "drive even more value out of the events we sponsor.”^[4]

Bet365 has pulled its backing of Newmarket's Craven meeting and its 23-year sponsorship of Haydock's Old Newton Cup and Lancashire Oaks.^[5]

Entain has also announced roughly 400 customer-care job cuts, and Paddy Power has opened a review that could see up to 100 shops and 400 jobs go. Betfred's own July closures already cost British racing an estimated £30,000 per shop annually in levy and media-rights payments, pushing the sport's total hit toward £4 million a year. 

Put together, this looks less like a string of individual commercial decisions and more like the start of a broader recalibration, one SportsBoom UK has flagged before in its coverage of the Premier League shirt-sponsorship gambling ban and its downstream effects on the Championship. 

Where that policy created a slow, structural retreat, the new tax regime is producing something faster and blunter: operators pulling out of decades-old partnerships within months of the duty change landing.

Whichever route it takes, the financial reality is blunt: rugby league has fewer alternative revenue levers than the sports currently absorbing similar losses, which makes this a more consequential test of the sport's commercial resilience than the Coral or Bet365 exits are for horse racing.