Paddy Power, an Irish betting company with a mission to stamp out nonsense, has a well-documented history of mischief-making.

Our goal was to earn attention and win the hearts of UK football fans at the start of the season.

In the UK, over two million people are addicted to gambling. Football clubs are addicted too with nearly 60% of UK clubs featuring a betting sponsor on their front of shirt. A great result for big budget bookmakers, but a terrible look for society and football fans, who had become nothing more than walking billboards.

While nearly every competitor had splashed their logo across the beautiful game, Paddy Power - the ultimate challenger brand - hadn’t. Therefore, to show our different stripes, we had to do something radical.

And, we knew there was one thing that fans value above all else – their football shirt.

Save Our Shirt.

The campaign was born with a sole purpose to return the sacred shirt back to the fans – a symbolic gesture backing the very people who make the beautiful game, well, beautiful: The fans themselves.

It might sound grand and serious and game-changing. And it was some of those things – but, at its core, Save Our Shirt was a clear, single-minded challenge to betting companies to stop bastardising football shirts and to return them to their rightful owners.

This issue wasn’t owned or controlled by Paddy Power. We simply started the ball rolling, encouraging everyone who feels slighted, exploited, or a bit embarrassed to wear their shirt out, to join us in the Save Our Shirt movement.

Our big strategic idea was a commitment to ‘Un-sponsor’ football, removing our logo from the sacred shirt and gifting it back to the fans so they could wear it with pride again, clean, de-logo-ed and pure.

We partnered with a progressive portfolio of football clubs spanning the pyramid of British football, with the recently relegated Huddersfield Town acting as the anchor club for our campaign.

Media intelligence revealed that the value from shirt sponsorship is vastly overestimated. So we made the bet that the PR generated from our campaign would more than make up for any lost brand exposure.

And we were right.

We made fans the lead actors in their own reality TV drama. First, we drew their ire to raise awareness of the issue. Next, we captured their hearts through an unprecedented act of generosity.

The Bait

We stoked outrage of football’s toxic relationship with betting by unveiling a fake Huddersfield kit – with a supersized Paddy Power sash logo splashed across the front.

By lunchtime, the horrific kit was trending worldwide.

Greeted by boos and demands for the kit to be banned, Huddersfield wore the shirt for a match against Rochdale. By morning, the story had made national TV news, and the Football Association had begun an investigation.

Meanwhile, as the story grew, we stayed quiet.

The Switch

At the height of the meltdown, we revealed the real ‘logo-less’ shirt and launched Save Our Shirt. We ‘un-sponsored’ four more clubs and extended the campaign via TV, OOH, press and social.

The beauty of Save Our Shirt was that everyone benefited.

Paddy Power were the most talked about brand ahead of the football season, trending twice globally on Twitter. New customers increased 15% and customer retention rose by 16%.

Huddersfield’s logo-less shirt became the 6th best-selling shirt in the UK - ahead of four Premier League giants. The fake kits became collector’s items, raising £30k for charity. One even resides in the Football Hall of Fame.

Most important was the real-world impact. In January 2020, the UK Sports Minister, citing ‘Save Our Shirt,’ announced a review of the Sports Gambling Act with the aim to regulate shirt sponsorship. And in February, Everton FC dropped betting brand SportPesa, as a sponsor 2 years early.

Paddy’s competitors even won – they’re now free to pursue more ethical (and inventive) ways of reaching fans.

Football, you’re welcome.