As football’s biggest tournament approaches, global sports and betting brands are recalibrating how they communicate around three core themes: surging fan engagement, rising expectations on transparency and ethics, and a much sharper focus on responsible gambling.

Chris Bird, Strategic Consultant at 1xBet, brings decades of experience across elite football, media and sponsorship to this challenge, advising the brand on how to align commercial growth with sustainable, responsible fan engagement.

In this interview, he shares his view on how audience behaviour changes during major football tournaments, how sports communications are evolving, and how brands can prepare for football’s biggest tournament by building responsible gambling into their strategies and culture rather than treating it as a regulatory formality.

Chris Bird on Responsible Gaming and the Future of Sports Communications

Chris Bird brings extensive experience across international sport, sponsorship and strategic development, including his tenure as a senior executive at Manchester City F.C.. Today, as Strategic Consultant at 1xBet, he applies this background directly to responsible gaming in a mainstream betting landscape.

“I’ve spent my life around people, pressure and moments that matter. From terraces to boardrooms, from newspapers to global brands. What prepares me for this role is not theory. It’s understanding behaviour. Why people act, how emotion drives decisions, and what responsibility looks like when the stakes are high.

“Betting is now part of mainstream sport. That means responsibility cannot sit on the edge, it has to sit at the centre. My role is to ensure it’s lived, not just written.”

The Evolution of Sports Communications

Over the past two decades, the communications environment around sport has shifted from episodic messaging to a 24/7, always-on dialogue with fans. For Bird, this has raised the stakes for authenticity and crisis response, but the fundamentals of trust remain constant.

“Communications in sport has moved from controlled to constant. Twenty years ago, you could shape a message. Today you are responding in real time, often under pressure, with millions watching and reacting.

What hasn’t changed is trust. People still buy into people. Fans still want honesty, and when things go wrong, how you respond still defines you more than the issue itself.”

Audience Behaviour During Major Tournaments

Big football tournaments remain emotional peaks for fans, but they now unfold in a context of unprecedented access to information and analysis. Bird notes that this combination of passion and data creates both complexity and opportunity for brands.

“Big tournaments amplify everything. Fans become more emotional. That will never change, but they are also more informed than ever. So you get a mix. Emotion driving behaviour, but information shaping it. The smart brands understand both.”

The Scale of Football’s Biggest Tournament

With a new format, more teams and more markets, the next cycle of international football competition turns the event into an extended platform rather than a single competition window. For brands and rights holders, that scale brings both reach and fragmentation.

“Scale changes everything,” Bird notes. “More teams, more games, more markets, more noise. From a business and communications point of view, it becomes less of a single event and more of a global platform over time. For fans, it will feel bigger but also more fragmented. The challenge will be keeping meaning and connection within that scale.”

Responsible Gaming as Cultural Integration

Bird insists that responsibility must be designed into the experience, not added as an afterthought or regulatory disclaimer. This is especially true during high emotion periods such as football’s biggest tournament, when engagement and risk both peak.

“You don’t bolt responsibility on, you build it in.”

“During moments like football’s biggest tournament, emotion is always high and that’s exactly when responsibility matters most. It’s about balance. Excitement on one side, clear guidance and protection on the other, and it has to be visible, consistent and real.”

Younger Audiences and Mental Health

Younger audiences expect relevance, simplicity and support across the platforms they use every day, while mental health becomes a central part of how the industry thinks about engagement. For Bird, duty of care must extend across the whole ecosystem.

“Education, visibility and simplicity. Younger audiences don’t respond to heavy messaging, they respond to clarity and relevance. Simple tools with clear limits and real stories on platforms they already use. You have to meet them where they are, not where you want them to be,” he says.

Beyond engagement tactics, Bird emphasises the broader responsibility the industry has toward psychological wellbeing:

• “This cannot be separate. Mental health and behaviour are directly linked to how people engage with sport, entertainment and betting. The industry has to recognise that. That means support, education and a genuine duty of care, not just for users, but across the whole community. If we ignore that, we miss the bigger responsibility completely.”

This perspective reflects a shift in how leading operators are beginning to think about their role, not merely as service providers, but as participants in a broader ecosystem where user welfare and long term sustainability are inseparable from commercial success.

Building Sustainable Growth

As football enters another peak cycle of global attention, brands that take responsibility seriously are also creating more resilient business models. For 1xBet, this means not only designing safer, more balanced experiences for users, but also building a long term ecosystem together with its partners through the 1xPartners affiliate programme.

Positioned at the intersection of fan engagement, technology and responsible gaming, the programme allows media owners, affiliates and marketing teams to tap into football’s biggest tournament with structured tools, transparent terms and an emphasis on sustainable player value rather than short term spikes in activity.

In this context, Chris Bird’s role goes beyond advising on messaging. His focus on behaviour, duty of care and mental health directly informs how 1xBet shapes both its consumer facing products and its B2B partnerships.

As global football tournaments become larger, more connected and more scrutinised, the brands and partners that will stay relevant are those able to combine emotional fan experiences with clear limits, practical education and a shared responsibility for the audiences they reach together.