This year’s UEFA Champions League is, if sponsor numbers are anything to go by, the tournament’s most crypto-friendly iteration yet.
Indeed, the 2025/26 edition of club football’s most prestigious competition boasts 48 crypto sponsorships, an increase of almost 30% over last year.
Of the 36 participating clubs, there are 24 with at least one crypto sponsor. Not only that, crypto exchange Crypto.com is sponsoring the league outright after signing a three-year partnership deal that will also see it sponsor UEFA’s Super League.
The price of this deal wasn’t revealed but in 2022, a planned sponsorship between UEFA and Crypto.com was worth almost $500M.
Mastercard is also sponsoring the competition, with the payments firm rolling out crypto-friendly cards for exchanges Binance, Nexo, and Gemini. Mastercard is also in the final stages of acquiring crypto infrastructure firm Zerohash for up to $2 billion.
Here’s a chart of all the teams and crypto sponsors you can see in this year’s Champions League.
Of the 36 participating clubs, there are 24 with at least one crypto sponsor.Read more: Champions League quarter-finalists all have crypto deals
UEFA hit with format theft lawsuit
The likes of Arsenal, PSG, and Bayern are leading the current league phase, while Ajax, Kairat, and Villarreal are trailing at the bottom of the table.
The Champions League league phase began in mid-September and runs until January 28 before the knockout stages begin.
However, the season hasn’t been smooth sailing so far for UEFA. The organization was hit with a lawsuit in October that seeks $23 million over the alleged theft of the competition’s format.
Spanish club Real Madrid is also pursuing “substantial damages” caused by UEFA after the football body lost a court appeal agains a previous ruling that found it was gatekeeping the European Super League with anti-competitive behavior.
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Source: https://protos.com/every-crypto-sponsor-for-the-2025-26-champions-league/
