Liverpool FC Wins Legal Dispute Over BetVictor Deal

Liverpool FC has won a High Court case over more than £1 million in commission said to be owing in relation to a £15 million sponsorship deal with a leading bookmaker.

Sports sponsorship firm Winlink claimed the current Premier League champions owed £1.125 million because one of their senior executives introduced club officials to their contacts at BetVictor in 2013.

Winlink argued that its introduction was “an effective cause” of a £5-million-a-year deal, signed in 2016, for BetVictor to sponsor Liverpool’s training kit between 2016-17 and 2018-19.

But Liverpool said their then head of global partnership sales Raffaella Valentino “personally negotiated the deal with BetVictor’s CEO, her friend Andreas Meinrad,” shortly after she joined the club in late 2015.

Judge Mark Pelling QC dismissed Winlink’s claim and ruled that the deal between Liverpool and BetVictor “owed nothing” to Winlink’s introduction.

The judge found that “the transaction was one that owed its genesis to the long-standing commercial relationship between Ms Valentino and Mr Meinrad.”

He added: “The bargain on offer in 2016 was of a completely different order of magnitude from the transactions being contemplated in 2014 and 2015 and, further, was qualitatively different as well.

“This was a principal global sponsorship arrangement that involved not advertising for a short period of time each match on LED hoardings, but a full spread of exposure on the training kit – but also elsewhere on pretty much everything generated by LFC other than the first team shirt.”