Why this Seattle-area startup is putting its name in front of an English Premier League soccer team
A Seattle-based developer tools startup is doing something that doesn’t cost money for banner ads or conference booths: it’s putting its name on the chest of an English Premier League soccer club.
Temporal, the $5 billion Bellevue workflow orchestration company, announced on Thursday that it will become the main sponsor of Crystal Palace Football Club from the 2026/27 season.
A marriage between the 7-year-old – whose clients include OpenAI, Netflix, and JPMorgan – and a South London football club with 164 years of history.
“Our goal has always been to put Temporal in the hands of all developers building the next generation of software, and a common playbook to get there reaching the most of them,” Temporal founder and CEO Samar Abbas wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the deal. “Millions of engineers around the world still have no reason to find out. Partnering with one of the most watched leagues and favorite teams in the world is a game-changer.”
Shirt sponsorship in the Premier League is serious money. Big deals – Manchester City’s deal with Etihad Airways, for example – run north of $80 million a year. For a mid-table club like Crystal Palace – whose previous shirt deal with Asian betting company Net88 was reportedly worth around £10 million, or about $13 million, per season – the figures are very modest.
Time works in Temporal’s favor: from the 2026/27 season, the Premier League bans gambling companies ahead of time, freeing up more than 125 million dollars in annual sponsorships combined across the league and forcing clubs to pay a new class of sponsors – including, apparently, engineering infrastructure companies from the Pacific Northwest.
Founded in 2019 by Abbas and Maxim Fateev — veterans of Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber — Temporarily builds open-source software and cloud services that help companies run long-term, complex workflows reliably — what it calls “solid execution.”
The rise of AI agents has increased demand for that kind of reliability, and temporarily raised $300 million earlier this year with revenue growing more than 380% year over year.
And the deal is more than a logo placement: Crystal Palace is becoming a Temporary Cloud customer, using the platform to modernize its e-commerce, payments, fan experience, and matchday operations as the club redevelops the main stadium.
Crystal Palace play at Selhurst Park, a 25,000-seat stadium in the London Borough of Croydon that has been the club’s home since 1924. The Eagles trace their origins to 1861, making them one of the oldest football clubs in the world.
The club almost went out of business in 2010, when the supporters’ union led by chairman Steve Parish had 24 hours to find a buyer or watch it close. They kept it, and what followed was one of the best comeback stories in English football: promotion to the Premier League in 2013, a first-ever FA Cup title in 2025, and now a place in next week’s UEFA Conference League final in Leipzig, Germany, against Spain’s Rayo Vallecano.
Interim CMO Clair Byrd, who wrote about the deal in a company blog post, said the partnership makes sense because the two organizations share a core value.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about long-term systems, sustainability, and what it means to build things that people can rely on for a long time,” he wrote. “He knows better than anyone how important this shirt is to this community, and we can’t say we understand what it means to wear it. It’s something we have to earn.”
With Seattle set to host games this summer as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the region is buzzing with soccer fever — and the tech scene is getting in on the action.
Temporal isn’t the only tech name with skin in the English game: Shivaas Gulati, founder of digital money transfer company Remitly and startup Arkero, has joined the consortium that owns Southend United – a fifth-tier English club – in 2024, with plans to use AI and software to modernize the club’s operations.
