Guild end £3.6m sponsorship due to year-long contract “uncertainty”

British organization Guild Esports have terminated their most lucrative sponsorship deal to date, citing “uncertainty about the contract” with the unknown financial tech company.

Guild Esports made a big impact in their first months of existence back in 2020 with the attachment of famed former professional football David Beckham and public listing on the London Stock Exchange.

The British org managed to leverage this attention to secure sponsorship deals, with their first-ever agreement being announced on October 19, 2020. Worth £3.6m over three years, the deal was struck with a mystery company that had yet to launch.

A year on from the initial announcement, the fintech business have still yet to actually unveil themselves in the public realm and, according to Guild, they’ve failed to pay the £1.1m that was agreed upon for the first year of the collaboration.

Guild have now terminated the sponsorship deal due to “delays in the sponsor’s launch” and because “none of the amounts scheduled under the contract have been paid”, causing them to feel “uncertainty about the contract”.

• Read More: Guild CEO on entering CS:GO: “Our interest has been pulled in other areas”

In a wide-ranging interview with Dexerto in August 2021, Guild CEO Kal Hourd had spoken on the mysterious sponsorship deal. “We’re waiting for them to launch their company, they just haven’t done that yet,” he said of the sponsor.

“The revenue that we expect from them in year one is still expected. We do expect to launch before the end of this year. We moved very fast when we launched Guild and not every company moves that quickly. We’ve promised the revenue to the market in year one and we need to deliver on that. We will likely either beef up their package throughout the remaining two years, or we could even extend it beyond the end of the three-year term.”

The org revealed in their latest financial report, dated June 30, 2021, that they had lost £4.3m over the previous six months. At the time, they had signed sponsorships worth a total of £7.5m — including a “multi-million-pound” deal with Subway — and that this was a main driver of revenue for the business.

Guild’s termination announcement on October 22 reveals that they are generating “strong and active interest from consumer brands in a wide range of sectors” and have deals that are at an “advanced stage of negotiations.”