The newly launched franchise-based South African T20 League SA20 has signed a multi-year deal with offshore betting and gambling company Betway as its title sponsor.

Betway has sponsorship agreements with Cricket South Africa and Cricket West Indies. Super Group, which is the holding company for Betway, has popular former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen as its brand ambassador who writes columns for its news platform Betway Insider.

Signing up famous cricketers as brand ambassadors has been the trend with these websites because of the influence that these players can generate in luring in more people to their platforms.

All the six franchisee owners of the league are Indian companies who own franchises in the IPL too. The matches will be telecast in India and the Indian cricket fans are the major target audience.

Betway, along with many other offshore betting companies, does not have permits to operate in India and therefore are operating illegally. These companies use surrogate websites to drive traffic to their websites. Many of the surrogate websites are dubbed as sports news websites with advertisements of and links to their official websites.

The Government has recently started cracking down on these surrogate websites. In October, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued advisories to several TV and OTT platform operators to refrain from broadcasting advertisements from these operators. Despite the warnings, few operators were still broadcasting advertisements.

While the Government also blocked the domains of these websites some companies like Fairplay has attempted to use different domains. While the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 has seen several changes in the last few months, the Government is working on effectively curbing these offshore websites.

Many of the sports teams and leagues have also been sponsored by these betting websites and since the advisories have halted all digital adverts, offshore websites have turned to traditional methods of outdoor advertising.

Other companies have also signed famous cricketers as their brand ambassadors for similar purposes recently and while they are not directly advertising in India they are using the cricketers’ popularity and potential pull to drive user growth for them.