Records from the Curaçao Gaming Authority have revealed the identity of the owner of the Premier League’s most visible illegal betting sponsor. But is “Ryan Li” really the man behind 8Xbet, or just a front?
By Philippe Auclair, with additional reporting by Jack Kerr, Sam Kunti, Steve Menary and Matthijs van Dam.
8Xbet and its supposed mothership, Curaçao-based company 978 Tech N.V., first came to Josimar’s attention when they signed a multi-million partnership deal with serial English champions Manchester City in July 2022. Seemingly out of nowhere, a previously-unknown sportsbook had caught one of the biggest fish in the football pond to become its “Official Betting Partner in Asia”. 8Xbet had also secured a legitimate domain name in the UK thanks to the ever-helpful White Label provider TGP Europe, an Isle of Man agency set up by Macau imprisoned felon Alvin Chau.
The statements published on the news wires and the club’s website had another unusual feature. They mentioned the name of the “Founder” of 8Xbet, one “Ryan Li”. Asian-facing unlicensed operators would normally try every trick in the book to disguise the names of their owners or top executives, even employing models and actors to impersonate them in official and public events. Not this time. Could “Ryan Li” be a real person? Could he actually be the man behind 8Xbet?
It is now possible to answer the first question. Yes, he is. German investigative journalist Lilith Wittman managed to gain access to tens of thousands of hitherto confidential records and filings from the Curaçao Gaming Board (CGB), the body responsible for issuing gaming licences in Curaçao, which was re-named the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA) in December 2024 after new legislation, called LOK, was introduced in the jurisdiction (*).
Wittman shared her findings online via a dedicated search tool, #CasinoSecrets, which Josimar used to review a wealth of documents pertaining to 978 Tech N.V., the Willemstad-based company which acquired a gambling licence for 8Xbet and forty-five of its domains from the CGB/CGA. Many of these documents relate to Li himself and shed light on a personal story that had been so well-concealed until now that it was legitimate to wonder whether he existed or not.
The “personal history disclosure form” which Li filled in March 2024 when 978 Tech N.V. applied for a renewal of their gambling licence lists him as Chief Executive, “Founder or co-founder” and Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) of the company. By all intents and purposes, Ryan Li is 8Xbet, at least on paper.
According to the official biography he provided to the CGB/CGA, 8Xbet’s boss “has over 10-year work experience in the game industry. He worked for Chuang Le Co., Ltd, a China registered company focusing on online game development from 2010 to 2017. Since 2017, Ryan has worked for a HK company – Virtual Gaming Technology Ltd as Senior Marketing Manager, selling developed games to world-wide game operators, and advising his clients on PR & Marketing strategy“. Another CGB/CGA document indicates that Li left his employment with Virtual Gaming Technology Ltd in July 2022, around the time 8Xbet announced their partnership deal with Manchester City.
Forms filed by 978 Tech N.V. when the company applied for License Approval in August 2025 show that its UBO changed his birth name by deed poll to become “Ryan Li” in 2017, the name under which he obtained a passport from the Commonwealth of Dominica in September 2022. He was born Shuilong Chen in the Chinese province of Fujian on 15 July 1986.
The only previous trace Josimar could find of “Shuilong Chen” was a brief mention of a “Classmate Chen” winning a “Computer-aided Design contest” in Beijing in June 2014. Josimar used the sole genuine photograph known of Chen/Li (a police certificate issued in 2024 by the General Department of Criminal Investigation of Dubai, where he says he resides and where Josimar had earlier found evidence of 8Xbet presence and activity) and running it through facial recognition software. Age, name, location and distinctive physical traits concur to indicate that “Classmate Chen” and “Ryan Li” are almost certainly the same person.
A talented and ambitious executive of a tech company can of course re-invent themselves as a successful entrepreneur; but Chen/Li’s ascent was inordinately swift, all the more so than in the online gambling industry, previous experience in the world of casinos (and/or poker) is a near-obligatory springboard to the creation of an online brand. It is difficult to imagine how the employee of a Hong Kong tech firm would have had the time and opportunity to magic a multinational sports betting brand out of nothing, especially one which operates from Curaçao, the UAE, Malaysia and, at least at one stage, most controversially, Cambodia.
Chen/Li himself is no gambling nabob. In 2025, he reported an annual income of 600,000 USD to the CGB/CGA, and a personal wealth of 1.5 million USD, nowhere near enough to make 8Xbet the most visible illegal sportsbook in English football with his own cash. No documents were provided to substantiate those figures.
The dots don’t join
Ryan Li’s unusual profile, when compared with other moguls of the Asian-facing sports betting industry, is not the only aspect of 978 Tech N.V.’s operation where the dots do not join to form a coherent picture.
8Xbet, which claims to have existed since 2018, started life as another brand, 978bet, who were first publicly mentioned in December 2021, when website football.london interviewed the sportsbook’s first global ambassador, former Manchester United and England striker Teddy Sheringham (*). 978 Tech N.V. itself was incorporated in Curaçao on 23 February 2021. 978bet was rebranded 8Xbet in March 2022, when negotiations to make Manchester City their “Official Betting Partner in Asia” had just started. This represented a staggering development in the operator’s ambitions – and financial resources, which bear no relation with the information they provided the CGB/CGA with.
According to accounts filed on 20 March 2024 by 978 Tech N.V. with the CGB/CGA, the company’s total assets as of 31 December 2021 were just 8,000 euro. One year later, its revenue had grown to 1.2 million euro while its liabilities had ballooned from 64,000 to 2.7 million euro “payable to shareholders”. Revenue increased again in the year ending 31 December 2023, to generate a net profit of 6.6 million euro for that year out of a revenue of 10.4 million. This constituted a very decent return on paper, but a pittance compared to the actual revenue of 8Xbet’s competitors.
Josimar was told by a former high-ranking executive of another Curaçao-licensed operator that his company’s turnover had exceeded 9 billion USD in a single year in 2023. 8Xbet would find it very difficult to maintain a visible presence in the market with income of that kind.
According to a confidential “price list” used by a specialist British agency to broker deals between betting operators, former footballers and football clubs, which Josimar has seen, “global ambassadors” are paid between 200,000 and 500,000 USD per annum, depending on the prestige attached to their names. Industry sources confirmed that exclusive official regional partnerships with elite clubs can be worth five to ten times that and, in City’s case, given the stature of the club, probably more.
For 8Xbet, this represented a quantum leap which is inconsistent with Ryan Li’s “wealth” and their own business projections. The “Business Plan 2024” they submitted to the CGB/CGA envisaged PR and Marketing expenses growing from 1 to 2 million euro between 2024 and 2026 – enough to pay for one non-exclusive partnership with a mid-ranking English club at the most.
Instead, during this period, 8Xbet switched from its partnership with Manchester City (at the end of the 2023-24 season) to an even costlier strategy of bombarding the LED perimeter boards of English League and Premier League stadiums with virtual advertising banners for their brand. Nine English clubs signed partnership deals with 8Xbet for the 2025-26 season, and eight still display advertisements for the brand in their arenas in 2026-27 (*). Those LED banners do not come cheap. The total cost to 8Xbet will run in the millions.
The numbers do not make sense. The Curaçao regulators must be given their due: they did flag problems and discrepancies with 978 Tech’s representations, ranging from the absence of Chen/Li’s birth certificate (which they waived away as “an explanation had been provided”) to documentation related to his personal wealth, even venturing whether Li was “acting as a nominee for a third party”, given his “relatively low stated net worth”.
In the end, a licence was issued regardless in August 2025, valid until February 2026. All the same, 978 Tech N.V. was “discontinued” as a Curaçao entity in July 2026. The reasons for this are not known, though they may be related to some inconvenient questions which were put to the company when it applied for a licence renewal. 8Xbet is still operational but no longer bothers with claiming an offshore licence in Curaçao or anywhere else. The current whereabouts of “Ryan Li” are unknown.
Perhaps the Premier League clubs which signed deals with his company could tell us?
Ryan Li and 8Xbet were contacted for comment. Josimar has contacted the Premier League partners of 8Xbet on multiple occasions but has yet to receive any answer to its questions.
(*) Josimar is using the CGB/CGA acronym for purposes of continuity and clarity in this article. The acronym will refer to whichever of the authorities was in charge of licensing at the time.
(*) Some 8Xbet mirror websites still claim Teddy Sheringham as their global ambassador.
(*) In 2025-26: Leicester City, Ipswich Town, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Leeds United, Sunderland, Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest and Newcastle United; in 2026-27: Leicester City, Ipswich Town, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Nottingham Forest, Newcastle United, Coventry City and Aston Villa.
The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.
This story is part of ‘Curacao: The EU outpost driving the global offshore betting market’, a collaboration between Play the Game, Josimar and Trouw.
This publication reflects only the author’s view and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
