Today at North London Is Red I welcome Daniel Smith who is sharing a very interesting piece of commercial information. Take it away Daniel….

I’m not one to stir up controversy or create conspiracy theories, but I recently stumbled across a piece of information that I think many Arsenal fans missed and may find intriguing.

For a short time, the Arsenal and our close rivals over at Manchester United were actually being sponsored by the same parent company.

Last year, the good folks over at Betsson signed a deal with the Gunners to become the primary gambling partner with the team. This deal basically meant that they took charge of taking bets at the stadium and they were in charge of creating GunnersGaming.com, a site that Arsenal fans can wager at online and even win their way to big time poker tournaments like the WSOP.

Back in August of this year, bwin signed a similar deal with Manchester United to become their betting partner. While seemingly a bit of unimportant sponsorship news at the time, the reality was that this deal tied the Arsenal and ManU together for a brief time.

The connection was not announced when deals were made and probably only the most commercially aware fans made the connection. Betsson is a site that currently resides on the Ongame Network. This network hosts multiple online poker and gambling sites. A couple of years back, bwin purchased the Ongame Network and took over operations of the site.

When the ManU deal was signed, essentially this meant that money from bwin.Party was being used to sponsor rival teams. While not a big deal to most, it is still a bit of interesting information that seems to have been overlooked.

Fortunately, that connection with bwin was short lived as the site decided to sell the Ongame Network and completed that transaction this past week. As such, Arsenal fans don’t have to worry about the team being connected with their rival any longer.

However, it does make one wonder why someone didn’t at least make this point known sooner. I’m not suggesting any shenanigans have occurred as a result of the teams being loosely linked, but fans of both squad may have liked that information. Betsson clearly made the better choice and no doubt will have backed the better squad for the long term.

Thanks for that Daniel. That was a really interesting read and certainly a piece of commercial news that I would have wanted to know when it was announced.

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