Defying Crypto Turmoil, Manchester City Signs Deal With Exchange OKX

This marks the third partnership between the Premier League champions and OKX, which is unavailable in the U.S.

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is expanding its partnership with Manchester City, taking over as the official sleeve sponsor of the club, it was announced Friday. Financial terms were not publicly disclosed, but a source tells Forbes that the agreement, which includes two previous deals, will pay the reigning Premier League champions more than $70 million over three years. Under the arrangement, OKX’s branding will be featured on the left sleeve of both men’s and women’s first-team playing jerseys.

The sponsorship marks the third deal between OKX and Manchester City in a little over a year. In March 2022, OKX became the club’s official cryptocurrency partner, and months later, it added the sponsorship of Manchester City’s training kits. Man City is the fifth-most-valuable soccer team on the planet at $4.99 billion, according to Forbes, having generated $815 million in revenue for the 2021-22 season. The club completed a “treble” during its most recent campaign, winning all three of its key competitions: the Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League.

Since its initial involvement with Manchester City, OKX’s first foray into sports sponsorships, the exchange has expanded its portfolio. It currently boasts partnerships with McLaren’s Formula 1 team, unsigned F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo, Olympic snowboarder Scotty James and golfer Ian Poulter, as well as Poulter’s LIV club, Majesticks GC. It also has independent deals with Man City players Jack Grealish and Alex Greenwood. In total, OKX estimates that its total annual spend on sports partnerships falls between $80 million and $100 million.

“Surprisingly, our total investment is actually less than many other firms that sponsor major sports, and we see our approach as cerebral and considered,” Haider Rafique, OKX’s global chief marketing officer, tells Forbes in an email.

Meanwhile, the dramatic decline in the value of cryptocurrency, which saw Bitcoin
BTC
fall from a peak of roughly $65,000 in November 2021 to below $17,000 over a 12-month span, has cast a dark cloud over the industry’s involvement in sports sponsorships.

FTX, the now-bankrupt crypto exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in various sports properties like the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena, umpire patch sponsorships in Major League Baseball and endorsements with athletes including Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, tennis phenom Naomi Osaka and future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady, as well as supermodel Gisele Bündchen, Brady’s wife at the time. Those deals have fallen apart.

Crypto.com announced this month that it was closing its U.S. institutional exchange, a setback that ESPN reports won’t affect the 20-year, $700 million deal signed in November 2021 for the naming rights to what was previously the Staples Center, the arena that’s home to Los Angeles’ two NBA teams.

“The industry downturn has had an impact on every marketer, and for us it’s been less an impact on the spend itself, but more on our distribution strategy,” OKX’s Rafique says by email. “For example, we pulled out of a Super Bowl ad partially because it was too close to the FTX collapse and we felt it would have been in bad taste to ‘go big’ at such a time.”

Crypto believers do have some positive developments to cling to of late. Bitcoin recently ticked back over $30,000, and giant asset managers BlackRock
BLK
and Fidelity announced they would offer Bitcoin ETFs to investors. Coinbase is among the companies pushing the U.S. government, either through the courts or Congress, for a regulatory framework to stabilize the industry over the long term. Questions persist, but OKX is optimistic at a time when several companies, including Voyager, Celsius and FTX, have gone belly up. “I’m bullish on the industry in the long term,” Rafique says. “Crypto and Web3 are not going away.”

OKX was founded in 2017 by embattled crypto entrepreneur Star Xu and is currently the eighth-largest exchange by trading volume in the world, according to CoinGecko.com. Based in the Seychelles, it operates in more than 180 markets and has 50 million-plus users. OKX is not available in the U.S. or Canada.