CorpComms Magazine

When Liverpool won the Champions League three years ago, following a night of extraordinary drama in Istanbul, it was not just the players and fans who knew they had conquered Europe on the biggest stage in club football.

Millions of viewers around the world watched on television as Steven Gerrard and his team-mates lifted the trophy and danced for joy - but what they also saw, on the famous red shirt of every Liverpool player and supporter, was the same single word repeated again and again: Carlsberg.

The cost of sponsoring one of the Premier League's leading clubs may run to many millions of pounds every season, but on a night like 25 May 2005 its value is almost priceless.

‘Carlsberg have become synonymous with Liverpool in recent years and the footage of the players celebrating on the podium in Istanbul after one of the most iconic matches of all time will always be played,' says Chris Hull, head of sponsorship at Nationwide building society and one of the sector's leading experts.

Mark Dixon, director of Fuse Sport, the sports marketing agency, agrees: ‘That night in 2005 was a fantastic hit for them [Carlsberg]. The value Carlsberg would have got out of it would have been phenomenal.'

Of course, not every match is the Champions League final, and not every club has the fan base and marketing appeal of Liverpool.

Popular sport

But in an era when English clubs, or at least the ‘top four' of the Premier League - Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool - are benefiting from increasing financial muscle and growing success on the European stage, the success of May 2005 remains the benchmark for the sort of gains that are potentially on offer to commercial sponsors.

‘There are huge gains to be had with successful English teams and probably more so than ever before thanks to the increasing dominance that Premier League sides are having on the European scene,' says Hull.

‘Over half the population have an interest in football whether that is attending a match every week or maybe just half a dozen a season. There is also a very strong male/female split and that is one of the big attractions for big brands.

‘In the 1980s football was very much a male domain and had significant problems associated with it, but over the past ten to 15 years it has upped its game remarkably. In terms of image, comfort within the stadiums, entertainment and spectator appeal it has changed enormously. It is about an experience around the 90 minutes and not just the 90 minutes itself.'

Neil Hopkins, head of sport at Four Sports, Arts & Sponsorship, adds: ‘With football, what you have is a huge target audience but also one that reaches just about every age and demographic profile. You reach the top-end corporates - the prawn sandwich brigade - but also the man on the street.'

It may seem an increasingly crowded sector, but for the top four and a handful of other clubs with particularly strong fan bases - the likes of Newcastle United, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton - sponsors insist that their investment is worth every penny.

Despite claims from some quarters that the sport's money making potential may have peaked or be close to peaking, most believe that, for these clubs at least, the reverse is true. In part, this is due to the growth of new television audiences in other parts of the world and the limitless opportunities of the internet and mobile phones.

Nor are the benefits simply to do with a vague increase in brand profile, but something more tangible than this.

As Max Bonpain, head of brand management at Samsung Electronics (UK), which is in the middle of a £50m five-year deal as main sponsor at Chelsea, explains: ‘We think it is definitely worth the money. We have done our own numbers, and as far as we are concerned we see clear benefits.'

The ‘Samsung' name on the Chelsea shirt is not, he believes, just wallpaper. ‘I can't give you the numbers, but we have research that shows that the Chelsea fan has a stronger awareness of Samsung compared to the non-Chelsea fan, and a stronger preference in terms of purchasing Samsung goods.'

Leveraging support

For both Samsung and mobile phone company O2, which was the main sponsor at Arsenal for three seasons until 2005 and is now a second-tier sponsor, the chance to be associated with a leading club is also about the way these companies seek to project themselves.

‘Arsenal play the style of football we want to be associated with,' says Nic Fletcher, O2's head of sport sponsorship. ‘They may be a north London club but they have a big following across the world and have been incredibly successful. They have a very strong and loyal fan base and that is incredibly appealing to a sponsor.

‘Fans with that degree of loyalty towards a club carry that loyalty towards their sponsors. The percentage of Arsenal fans on O2 versus the general population is between five to ten per cent higher, and that is just one indicator that our sponsorship is working.'

In an age when television audiences for Premier League matches are growing around the world - but particularly in Asia and the Far East - it is no surprise that sponsorship reflects this.

The world's biggest insurer, American International Group (AIG), which was recently bailed out by America's Federal Reserve Board, hoped that its sponsorship of Manchester United would raise its profile in Britain. But, above all, the move was aimed at the company's massive market in the Far East.

Although the sponsorship may now be in doubt, the company, which was founded in Shanghai in 1919, had committed to pay £56.5m over four years to have its logo on the chests of players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney - hoping that this would endear it to the club's 40 million Asia-based fans, around half of whom are in China.

As Wendy Stephenson, chief executive of Sponsorship Consulting, puts it: ‘AIG sponsored Manchester United because it is one of the very few truly global brands in sport.'

Further down the Premier League, Chang Beer, part of Thailand's biggest brewer, is now the main sponsor at Everton, while in another example of the global appeal of English football, Sheffield United, now in the Football League Championship, signed a deal with Malta, the Mediterranean island, this year.

Although the sheer number of sponsors involved in football make it increasingly hard for a single name to stand out, the best companies are still able to achieve this.

Samsung makes the most of its sponsorship by having Chelsea players star in its television adverts, while across London at Arsenal, Emirates airline announced a deal four years ago that has been hailed as ground-breaking. The £100m tie-up included shirt sponsorship but also naming rights over Arsenal's critically acclaimed new stadium in Finsbury Park until at least 2021.

But while there are obvious benefits to sponsoring a football club - including the passion and loyalty of fans, and the global appeal of big names - there are also downsides. Not only is there the fear of alienating supporters from rival clubs, but also the knowledge that a side's fortunes can go down as well as up - and with it the profile of any brand associated with it.

Own goal

According to Nationwide's Hull, which has sponsored the England team since 1999: ‘There is absolutely no question that our success as a sponsor correlates with the success of the team on the pitch.

‘We know that when England got to the quarter final of the World Cup in 2002 as much as 50 per cent of the football audience was aware that Nationwide was involved with the England national team, and it doesn't get much better than that.

‘But there are also challenging periods, like we've had this summer. After England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 we saw the knock-on effect because people weren't as warm towards the national team. It really is as stark as that.'

The problem can be even more acute for companies that sponsor individual players, according to Hopkins.

‘There is the classic argument that a player can suddenly turn from hero to villain, and David Beckham has been a good example of that at various points of his career,' he says. ‘Other issues when you sponsor a player include the worry of him suffering injury and also being associated with bad behaviour such as drugs.'

One way to overcome the vagaries of club, country and individual players is to opt for league or championship sponsorship, though at the highest level - such as the (Barclays) Premier League, Champions League and World Cup - this excludes all bar those with the deepest pockets.

From 1996 to 2004, Nationwide was the title sponsor of the Football League - comprising 72 clubs in three divisions immediately below the Premier League.

Hull says: ‘One of the positive elements about sponsoring a club is the exposure that those teams get day in day out for 40 to 42 weeks during a season and even during the summer with transfer speculation and pre-season tours.

‘But when your name is associated with the league you get national and regional exposure. We were getting 72 clubs across the country with 72 different fan bases and a geographical spread to die for.'

But although sponsorship of the biggest clubs, leagues and players is still viewed as a good investment, venturing beyond the most high-profile names is far less straightforward.

As on the pitch, there is a growing polarisation between the sides at the top of the Premier League and those further down, where the clubs have less international appeal and lack the resources of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich's Chelsea or Malcolm Glazer's Manchester United.

Changing sponsors

This season, there are also signs that sponsors are beginning to drive a harder bargain over money - thanks in a large part, no doubt, to the economic downturn.

For the first time in living memory, a Premiership club - West Bromwich Albion - started the season without a shirt sponsor, while other sides are also becoming increasingly frustrated by their failure to attract the same sort of cash as the top four.

According to Hopkins, even with smaller clubs there can be strong benefits for sponsors ‘so long as you are clear from the outset what you want to achieve' - and the good news is that it will cost less.

In March Blackburn Rovers signed a three-year deal, reportedly worth up to £5m, with Crown Paints, one of the largest employers in Lancashire. The move was a clear example of a club providing a strong marketing platform for a local company, many of whose employees are Rovers fans.

Unlike 15 or 20 years ago, very few firms now agree to sponsor football clubs simply out of vanity or because the company chairman happens to be a fan.

Most companies think long and hard about what they will get out of the arrangement and measure the gains with market research; even where clubs have half a dozen second-tier sponsors, there are usually clearly defined benefits - from pitch-side advertising to access to a club's membership lists.

There are also, of course, the benefits that are almost impossible to measure - from the boost to employee morale to the deals conducted over a few glasses of wine in the corporate hospitality boxes.

In another example of a regional tie-up, Waitrose announced in June that it was to become the main sponsor of Reading Football Club, just 15 miles from its Bracknell headquarters.

However, by far the most eye-catching deal this year has been at Aston Villa, where the Premier League club pulled off a PR coup by giving its shirt sponsorship free of charge to Acorns, a local children's hospice charity.

It is a move that brings the Birmingham club closer to its local roots whilst also boosting its corporate social responsibility credentials.

‘For our strategic purposes this is gold,' says Monica Wharton, head of marketing and communications at Acorns. ‘It gives us an amazing platform to explain why we are here. It allows us to dispel the myth that children's hospices are dark grey places that children go to just to die and to educate people about what we do.'

In measurable media output - newspaper cuttings and broadcast time - the deal has already been worth nearly £1m for Acorns. ‘It drove a huge amount of awareness,' says Wharton. ‘We had hits from all across the world on our website, with 11,000 hitting the site on one day, the biggest spike ever.'

From Villa's point of view, the deal has also had an impact. ‘The attendance at games has been down recently but we have gone up to over 40,000 again which is the highest since the 1930s,' says Duncan Riddle, head of community at the club.

‘We are on a rebuilding process and hopefully this will win back some of the hearts of our supporters. There is a lot of cynicism around Premier League clubs and the amount of cash flying around. We felt we could cope without the money.'

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