Wolverhampton Wanderers, an English professional football team, has signed a partnership with cryptocurrency exchange CoinDeal.

The exchange’s logo will appear on the sleeves of the footballers’ shirts and appear on LED screens around the stadium.

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CoinDeal

CoinDeal handles $1.3 million in daily trading volumes according to coinmarketcap.com, and its website supports six languages. When visiting the website, you are greeted with the words “STOP! THIS IS THE RIGHT PLACE.” It seems to place emphasis on being user-friendly, for example allowing users to vote for a new cryptocurrency to be added.

It is operated by a company called Verified Trading Solutions, which is based in Cyprus. The exchange also has offices in Switzerland and Poland. The exchange says that its aim is to be licensed by the Swiss financial watchdog, FINMA, and it created a company called VTS Swiss GmbH for this purpose.

CoinDeal co-founder Kajetan Maćkowiak said: “I have always had a passion for the world of sports and its impact on consumers. At CoinDeal we are very aware of the impact that football marketing can have on brand and its community, especially in industry such as ours. We believe that a club like Wolves will help portray our message global.”

Wolves

Wolverhampton Wanderers FC was created in 1877 under the name St. Luke’s FC, and changed its name two years later after merging with the Blakenhall Wanderers, a local cricket team. It was one of the founding teams of the English Football League in 1888, which itself is the oldest league in the world (its original name was the ‘Football League’).

It will begin the 2018/19 season in the Premier League, having been promoted from the Championship league last season.

Wolves managing director Laurie Dalrymple said: “We are absolutely thrilled to partner with CoinDeal at such an exciting time in Wolves’ history, and very pleased to announce our first ever shirt sleeve sponsor. Once more a partner has agreed to tweaking the colour of their logo to complement our kit, which is a huge gesture of goodwill towards the club and its fans, and something we are very grateful for.”

Sponsorship

Sunny Singh, CEO of Van Hawke Sports, told Finance Magnates: “The sponsorship itself is not surprising considering Wolves owners ONSUN continuing investment in Blockchain tech, most notably Onchain. That said the Polish founded CoinDeal and Wolves sponsorship is a wonderful example of a cryptocurrency firm using sports sponsorship of a EPL team as a means to raise their brand awareness on a global scale. It won’t be too long before we start seeing player transfers conducted using cryptocurrency.”

The first ever football kit sponsorship deal was revealed in January 1976 when an English team called Kettering Town came onto the field with the words ‘Kettering Tyres’ on their chests. The team was actually ordered to remove the logo because worded advertising had been banned from the football league in 1972. The practice was formally allowed in 1977 after other teams put pressure on the Football Association.

The Kettering Tyres deal was reportedly worth a 4-figure sum; in the 2017 Premier League season, the 20 teams’ sponsorship deals were worth £281 million.