The long-time anti-gambling advocate from Alliance for Gambling Reform Tim Costello criticised the Australian Football League (AFL) for “corrupting the sport” through its deal with a company that trades with cryptocurrency. Mr Costello further shared that the League has what he described as “utterly immoral form” and is compromising the sport with agreements such as its sponsorship deal with Crypto.com. The controversial sponsorship deal is worth AU$25 million.
On January 18th, the AFL officially announced a landmark 5-year deal with the cryptocurrency company Crypto.com, which has been unveiled as a key partner of both the National Australia Bank AFL Women’s (NAB AFLW) and Toyota AFL Premiership Season competitions. Under the provisions of the new partnership agreement, Crypto.com will become the AFL’s and AFLW’s Official Cryptocurrency Exchange and Official Cryptocurrency Trading Platform.
At the time when he announced the deal, the CEO of the Australian Football League Gillon McLachlan described blockchain and cryptocurrency technology as an emerging and dynamic sector.
Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency trading platform and supports payments with digital encrypted currencies. Pre-paid debit cards are also offered by the platform. For the time being, it has inked deals with various international sporting brands, such as UFC and Formula One. The firm is also set to run an advertisement featuring the popular Hollywood actor Matt Damon at the Super Bowl next month.
Cryptocurrency Trading Companies Trying to Gain Customer Recognition and Trust through Sports Sponsorship Deals
Mr Costello, who is currently the chief advocate of the Alliance for Gambling Reform, said that cryptocurrency could be much more profitable in such a relationship than conventional gambling. However, he noted that both were compromising the integrity of the AFL.
According to him, any relationship of the Australian Football League with cryptocurrency trading and gambling companies corrupt and compromise the sport. He further noted that the historical relationship between sports betting operators and the AFL has already made him suspicious about the newly-announced deal. Mr Costello said that AFL clubs had managed to bet out of their detrimental relationship with pokies but the League had not moved an inch regarding its relationship with Sportsbet and in terms of the so-called saturation ads.
According to David Glance, who is a computer scientist at the University of Western Australia and also a cryptocurrency expert, digital asset companies were trying to gain legitimacy through some partnerships, such as the AFL sponsorship deal of Crypto.com.
Such recognition would probably help Crypto.com to gain more trust from consumers, especially considering the fact that its customer support account on social media was responding to complaints from a large number of users at the time when the AFL deal was announced. Users claimed they had been kicked out of their accounts, and some of them say they had lost money. Some people responded to the cryptocurrency company’s announcement on Twitter that its platform had been experiencing “a small number of users reporting suspicious activity” on their customer accounts, saying their accounts had become subject to a hacker attack and their money was missing. These claims have been refuted by Kris Marszalek, the CEO of Crypto.com, who explained that no customer funds had been lost.
- Author
Olivia Cole
