Pedaling partnerships: exploring the influence of gambling companies as cycling team name sponsors on cycling fans

The significance of sponsorship in professional road cycling is evident in the way cycling teams incorporate their sponsors' brand names into their official team names. Gambling and lottery brands frequently sponsor cycling teams, resulting in team names including gambling brands. Extant literature suggests that sponsorship may evoke less resistance compared to regular advertising due to its implicit nature. However, the specific impact of such sponsorships and their potential impact among cycling fans remains underexplored. This study investigates the impact of gambling sponsorship, compared to branded content, on cycling fans' gambling urge and the gambling company's corporate reputation. Additionally, it incorporates two mediators: perceived altruistic motives and inferences of manipulative intent. The preregistered between-participants experiment involved 181 cycling fans scrolling through an Instagram channel of either a cycling team with a gambling sponsor or a gambling brand itself. Our study revealed that a gambling brand is perceived as more altruistic when it sponsors a road cycling team (compared to regular branded content). These higher perceived altruistic motives led to a decrease in manipulative intent perceptions of the gambling brand. Subsequently, these lowered manipulative intent perceptions increased both cycling fans' gambling urge and the gambling company's corporate reputation. Finally, a three-way interaction revealed that the branded content had a direct positive effect on the corporate reputation of the gambling company, but only for young males. These results provide valuable theoretical and practical insights into the impact of controversial sponsors on sport fans, particularly among vulnerable demographic groups.