The Alfa Romeo Formula One team’s $140 million sponsorship with an Australian-owned crypto gambling company will be invisible at this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix.
The coveted and very valuable real estate will instead be filled by a lesser-known partner of F1: Kick, a hot, new streaming competitor to Twitch that’s quickly become the online home to gambling broadcasts.
Earlier this week, the Alfa Romeo F1 Team shared a new design for its Australian Grand Prix helmet on Instagram. The distinctive “one-off” helmet was designed by Indigenous artist Ricky Kildea.
Noticeably absent from the design was the logo or any reference to the team’s title sponsor, Stake.
The cryptocurrency online casino service, owned by 27-year-old Australian Ed Craven and his 28-year-old American partner Bijan Tehrani and valued at $2 billion, reportedly spent $140 million securing the rights earlier this year.
At last week’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the Stake logo was emblazoned on the team’s racing gear, casualwear, helmets and all over their vehicles. But in promotional material for their trip down under, the Stake logo was missing.
In its place is the logo for Kick, a gambling-friendly upstart streaming platform that a Crikey investigation found was owned by the owners of Stake. Kick was launched with a promise to allow online gambling streaming, which had been banned on Twitch. “Slots and casino” streams are among the site’s most popular streams, with creators often spending hours gambling on online casinos while thousands of fans watch.
What’s the reason for the missing Stake logo? Neither Stake, the Alfa Romeo team nor the Australian Grand Prix Corporation responded to requests for comment, but the answer may lie in Australia’s gambling laws.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s gambling advertising rules restrict advertising during live sports events, but there is an exception for “accidental and incidental references to gambling, such as signage or players’ uniforms”. ACMA has been approached for comment as to whether custom helmets and vehicle designs would fall under this.
What is likely an issue is that Stake does not hold an Australian gambling licence and advertising a prohibited interactive gambling service is a breach of the Interactive Gambling Act.
Monash School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine associate professor Dr Charles Livingstone, who researches gambling, said that Stake’s advertising would likely fall afoul of this law.
“Having a big logo for an online offshore casino would be pretty hard to ignore,” he said.
He said that substituting Stake’s logo for one belonging to a streaming platform owned by Stake’s owners would likely sidestep regulation. He said it’s another example of how online gambling regulation is like “whack-a-mole”.
Fellow gambling researcher and Deakin University Institute for Health Transformation’s professor Samantha Thomas said the logo substitution shows how online gambling restrictions need to evolve quickly in a changing environment.
“It’s interesting how tight the regulations need to be to consider all forms of marketing to ensure that these companies are not able to get around the restrictions,” she said.
Thomas notes that creating and promoting a gambling-friendly platform like Kick wasn’t likely to be illegal but it is one of the strategies that companies use to normalise gambling for young people. She said that while Kick’s gambling streams are “age-gated” to stop minors from accessing them, viewing the streams is as simple as clicking a box to say that the viewer is an adult.
“It’s an industry that has massively benefited from technological advances and at the moment, our regulations are not yet competing,” she said.
