We’ve already seen a group of fans gettting together and buying a football club. Some of the UK clubs have been hugely innovative deriving more revenue from those that attend matches and making clubs more family friendly. I wonder though (and this goes back to the personal brand thing) about how long before soccer players demand a piece of their strip for their own use? Will the left sleeve be given to Ronaldo to sell his own sponsorship on when he moves clubs as a way of the club paying less for his transfer? How much is the space on his left shoulder worth? 10k a week? A million a year? Will we see kits starting to become like Formula 1 drivers?
For the ickle clubs it might be a nice way for the players who probably earn a comfortable but not fantastic living to make some money back with local businesses also sponsoring them. A local business might not be able to sponsor the strip, but an individual player, perhaps.
Have a good weekend.
Photo owned by Mikey G Ottawa (cc)
They’re already doing in Damien – what do you think their boots are for 😀
Funnily enough on the buying a player idea. Coca-Cola had a great initiative a couple of years ago where a fan would win the chance to buy a player for his team for 250k http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/b/brighton/4637181.stm
Pretty much every single player at every league team, UK and Ireland is available for or is already sponsored by a local business, fansite, individual, etc. For the past while I had a part share (along with many others) of the sponsorship of Brighton’s physio and a former player, Guy Butters. Unsure who’s being sponsored next season as yet.
It doesn’t get you on the kits – at low rank football clubs, the kind likely to be cash strapped, only attending fans see the kits due to rarely being on TV and any small text is unreadable. But it gets you in the programme, on the website, mentioned in PR, etc, etc. I’d say Brighton manage to raise about 20 grand a year from the venture – any higher and they’d price themselves out of getting enough sponsors for the entire team.
HI Damien, I’ve worked both sides of that fence both as a player and on the sponsorship side for clubs. As Cian says this already happens and indeed has been quite common for the last 20 years at least. Being on the shirt in a small way isn’t very valuable for the reasons Cian points out.
This would be VERY commercially interesting with Premiership players but ultimately wouldn’t work from the clubs pespectives.