Football has always been a useful guide to what Britain is comfortable selling.

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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........

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