Football Heavyweight Inter Sweating Over Crypto Firm’s ‘Non-Payment’ of Sponsorship Deal

cryptonews.com:

The Milan-based Italian footballing giant Internazionale is facing a rocky start to its relationship with crypto – amid reports that DigitalBits, a company that agreed to a USD 87m sponsorship deal with Inter this year – has defaulted on a sponsorship payment.

Inter made headlines in the footballing and crypto world in January when reporters revealed that the company was set to strike a three-year deal with DigitalBits. The terms of the deal will see the DigitalBits logo displayed on the front of the first team jersey from the 2022-2023 season. The deal is due to expire in 2025. Inter has an existing relationship with DigitialBits – the company paid for sleeve sponsorship rights during the 2021-2022 season.

The crypto company has also become Inter’s “official crypto partner.” But, Italy’s top footballing newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport reported that DigitalBits has not “honored” a “tranche” of payments to Inter – a fact that has led the relationship between the club and its main sponsor to “become complicated.”

Both parties had denied the existence of any financial-related issues several weeks ago after rumors about a non-payment first began to circulate.

But the situation appears to have changed for the worse since then. Inter is “not standing still,” the newspaper reported. And it has responded to what now appears to be a clear non-payment by “doing what it can do.”

The club has removed most DigitalBits branding from its web-based platforms. While the firm’s logo can still be seen in photos of the club’s shirts, no other mention of the crypto company is now visible on Inter-related sites. The company’s name has also been removed from a list of official partners on the club’s website.

A friendly match held over the weekend saw