If football can live with betting firms, why are we so awkward about defence?

For the first time, gambling companies were absent from the front of every club’s matchday shirt. The logos that had become part of the furniture - there on Match of the Day, there on replica shirts, there while children copied their favourite players in the park - had finally been moved elsewhere.

During the 2024/25 season, 11 of the league’s 20 clubs had gambling companies across the front of their shirts, with those deals worth a combined £101 million. Despite resistance and impending changes, ask the average football fan, and I doubt many would have given it a second thought.

Football eventually decided it had gone too far, and from this season Premier League clubs have voluntarily removed gambling companies from the front of matchday shirts. Betting brands can still appear elsewhere around grounds and on kit, and anybody watching the opening weekend would have found little evidence that the industry had disappeared from football altogether. But the most prominent piece of commercial property had changed.

Defence occupies a rather different place in British culture, and the difficulty runs much deeper than the question of which logo appears beside a football pitch. The sector has an image problem, an almost instinctive ick factor which affects how companies are treated long before anybody examines what they actually make, who they employ or why the country might need them.

You can see the consequences in some fairly unglamorous places.

Parliament has spent considerable time examining defence companies struggling to access banking and finance, including concerns about overzealous ESG screening and compliance policies. Ministers have had to get involved after defence employers faced intimidation and protests while trying to recruit graduates at university careers fairs.

The Ministry of Defence itself has described a longstanding Armed Forces recruitment and retention crisis, while industry is competing desperately for engineers, software developers and other scarce technical skills. These are different challenges with different causes, but they exist within the same cultural atmosphere, where defence can still feel like a sector people are expected to distrust before they understand it.

Against that backdrop, Leeds United did something rather interesting. They signed North Defence as their “Official Defence Partner” for the 2026/27 season, using precisely those words. North Defence manufactures military light-mobility vehicles and employs engineers, tradespeople and specialists whose work sits firmly inside Britain’s defence industrial base. Its branding will appear on screens and advertising around Elland Road. Leeds deserve some credit for avoiding the euphemisms.

They could easily have called North an “advanced mobility partner” or wrapped the whole arrangement in enough corporate vocabulary to make everyone forget what the company actually does. They chose “defence”, and the world carried on turning.

So did the football. Leeds began their Premier League season on Saturday with a 1–0 victory away at Nottingham Forest, Anton Stach’s 88th-minute free-kick providing a rather satisfying opening-day conclusion. Because the match was at the City Ground, North Defence’s Elland Road advertising did not feature. It will make its league debut when Leeds play their first home fixture.

The partnership has nevertheless crossed the small but important boundary between a pre-season announcement and the everyday reality of a Premier League campaign. That is the point. It did not overshadow the match, provoke some great national convulsion or require supporters to arrive at a settled view on defence procurement before discussing the result. Leeds played, Leeds won, and a defence company remained one of the club’s official partners. Normality can sometimes make an argument more effectively than controversy.

Leeds are hardly charging into completely unexplored territory either. Borussia Dortmund has had Rheinmetall, one of Germany’s biggest defence and technology companies, as a major commercial partner since 2024. In America, the relationship between sport, defence and the military is considerably more visible; Anduril is now NASCAR’s official defence partner and this summer put its name to a Cup Series race held at Naval Base Coronado.

Last season, closer to home, the British Army sponsored Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage. That small decision touches on a much bigger British awkwardness.

We are perfectly capable of believing that defence matters in private while becoming strangely coy whenever it appears in public. We support service personnel on Remembrance Sunday, tell ourselves that NATO is important, cheer British support for Ukraine and expect governments to keep the country safe, yet we still prefer to keep defence at arm’s length, somewhere between a necessary expense and an embarrassing family secret.

The opening round of the new Premier League season offered a striking illustration.

The awkwardness is now colliding with official policy. Britain’s Strategic Defence Review calls for a “whole-of-society” approach to national security and says explicitly that defence can no longer simply be contracted out to the Armed Forces.

Its authors want a national conversation about the threats facing Britain, the role wider society plays in responding to them and why defence needs public support; they even recommend making the Armed Forces more visible in society. That ambition is hard to reconcile with a culture in which many of the organisations involved in defending the country still make polite society shuffle in its seat.

A whole-of-society approach requires defence to exist in the whole of society: in schools and universities, in business and finance, in communities, in popular culture and, yes, around football. The nation’s favourite sport offers a pretty good place to start.

The discomfort becomes particularly strange when you look at what the modern defence sector actually consists of. Government figures put the number of UK jobs supported by defence at around 460,000, with roughly 24,000 apprenticeships. The work spans software engineering, robotics, AI, cybersecurity, quantum technology, shipbuilding, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and autonomous systems.

The Strategic Defence Review has identified persistent shortages in digital, AI and data skills, exactly the sort of disciplines that Britain spends the rest of its economic policy desperately trying to encourage.

These are people building some of the most sophisticated technology produced in this country. Many are young engineers, coders, technicians, and apprentices working on problems whose difficulty would impress us enormously if the customer were a Silicon Valley company. Attach the word “defence” and our cultural response changes. There is obviously a reason for that.

Defence technology exists because the world contains threats, violence and war, and nobody sensible wants more of any of them. Yet a country can hate war wholeheartedly while taking the means of deterring it seriously. The engineers designing systems to intercept drones are hardly campaigning for more drones to be fired at us.

There is also something slightly perverse about Britain being shy of its defence engineering at precisely the moment the Government wants the country to become one of the best places in the world to start, finance and grow a defence business.

We are talking about billions more going into autonomous systems, AI, cyber, space and advanced manufacturing, with nearly 60,000 additional jobs expected to be supported by increased defence investment by 2029/30. If Britain wants the economic dividend, working in the industry cannot continue to carry the faint suggestion that it requires an apology.

Recent events have made Britain’s old habit of regarding serious military threats as distant problems feel increasingly indulgent. In the days before the Premier League season began, Russia warned Britain of “consequences” over our support for Ukraine. At the same time, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested Moscow could regard the UK as a participant in the conflict.

Nobody needs to start digging an Anderson shelter in the garden. Still, it is a useful reminder that the Channel is only twenty-odd miles wide and modern conflict travels rather well through cyberattacks, drones, sabotage, interference, and disinformation.

Security has become part of everyday national life whether we enjoy discussing it or not. Football could have a useful role in making that conversation more normal. Its reach is almost impossible to replicate elsewhere. Last season the British Army became one of the six sponsors of Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage, sitting in a commercial line-up alongside Guinness, Coca-Cola, Uber Eats, EA Sports and bet365, which sounds less like a sponsorship portfolio and more like an unusually accurate description of a British Saturday afternoon.

The Army used the partnership for recruitment, and that makes perfect sense. For all the enduring imagery of marching boots and muddy training grounds, the Armed Forces are also recruiting engineers, medics, cyber specialists, intelligence analysts, aviation technicians, logisticians and digital experts.

Football reaches millions of people who may never visit a careers fair, read a Ministry of Defence website or encounter those jobs through any other route.

There is a broader question underneath recruitment, though. If we ask people to serve this country, train for conflict, deploy when required and accept risks most of us will never face, why should the institutions they serve feel somehow unsuitable for mainstream public life? Support for the Armed Forces should extend beyond applauding them when they march onto a pitch before a Remembrance fixture.

It should include taking an interest in what they do, understanding the careers they offer, respecting the expertise around them and giving them space in national culture. Football has immense power to confer that sense of familiarity. Things seen around football stop feeling remote very quickly.

Sponsorship is only one way of doing it, but it is a particularly powerful one because sponsorship confers familiarity without demanding a lecture. A company on the LED boards at Elland Road becomes part of the everyday commercial landscape of the game; an Army recruitment campaign during Premier League coverage puts military careers in the same cultural space as every other employer trying to find talented young people.

Repetition removes some of the mystique, and, with defence, some of it has become part of the difficulty.

The same principle applies to reputable defence companies. Of course clubs should conduct serious due diligence. A company’s customers, ownership, governance and record matter, particularly in a sector where the consequences of getting those judgements wrong are serious.

Football’s recent adventures with crypto, gambling and opaque overseas sponsors suggest more scrutiny across the board would hardly be a terrible development.

Yet the category itself should cause us far less embarrassment. If a British company is producing world-class engineering, employing apprentices, developing advanced technology, supplying democratic allies, and helping to equip the people responsible for our security, I see little virtue in pretending that its work becomes distasteful the moment somebody puts its logo beside a football pitch.

The comparison with gambling is uncomfortable because football tolerated that relationship for so long and at such scale. Eleven clubs, £101 million in one season, with logos visible to adults and children every weekend. This weekend, for the first time, the league presented itself without a betting company on the front of a single matchday shirt.

Yet betting brands remain perfectly entitled to buy other Premier League inventory. Defence companies, meanwhile, can still generate a debate simply by turning up. Leeds appear to have reached a more confident conclusion.

Perhaps their “Official Defence Partner” will prove unremarkable, which would actually be quite an important outcome. Its first weekend as a Premier League partnership passed with the focus where supporters would expect it to be: on the match, the performance and a late winning goal. Defence should be subjected to scrutiny, debate and ethical judgement, while also occupying a normal place in the society whose security it exists to protect.

Britain’s whole-of-society defence policy will ultimately depend on more than government documents and spending commitments. It asks people to understand why defence matters, companies to invest in it, talented people to work in it and communities to support those who serve.

That requires a cultural relationship with defence as well as a financial one, and culture happens in places people actually care about. Few institutions in Britain have greater power to shape that than football. Nobody wants war. Most people would happily live their entire lives without seeing Britain fight another one.

History suggests our preferences carry limited weight with people who may wish us harm. A mature country should be able to celebrate the people who build its defences, support the men and women who may one day have to use them, and hope fervently that they never have to.

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Daria Partas is the founder of Partas Global, a London-based strategic communications agency.

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