Shirt Sponsors

Advertising with a sports team is one of the most popular ways to get your brand name out there.  If you have an on field ad you get at least 90 minutes of camera time.  But how do you keep your brand in front of potential consumers for longer?  The answer is in the title, shirt sponsorships!

Most teams adopted shirt sponsors at the boom of advertising, at the beginning of the 20^th century.  Although the U.K. was one of the last to accept this practice, it has become the must lucrative league for shirt sponsors due to it being the most popular with 7 of the top 10 shirt sponsorship deals.   However, Spanish side, Barcelona, currently make the most with a $38,337,500 per year deal with the Qatar Foundation, while the German giants, Bayern München, come in second with a $36,190,600 per year deal with Deutche Telekom.  From there on the only non-English teams are Real Madrid (7^th - Bwin) and AC Milan (9^th- Emirates). 

To an outsider of European football, this probably seems a little ridiculous, especially since you don’t see sponsor's logos on the shirts of American football, basketball, or baseball teams.  Shouldn’t you be concerned about decreasing the image of your club or spoiling the image of the uniform?  This is an honest concern, because if you look at some South American shirts you might confuse them with NASCAR outfits with sponsors in the middle, on the arms, and on the back. 

Or why pay a ton of money to only sponsor one sports team?  Well that answer is pretty obvious when you consider that the average season is from August to May, longer than any American sports season, meaning more time in front of viewers.  You also should consider that the majority of sporting focus is on football, so they get the majority of attention on the TV, in print ads, etc.  Of course, what I think is the biggest bonus, is the shirt sales!  For example, over the past 5 years Nikes top selling jersey, Manchester United, and Adidas’ Real Madrid, averaged 1.4 million shirts sold a season.  That means 1.4 million people own a shirt with your name smack-in-the-middle of it.  That also means you have 1.4 million mini billboards walking around. 

I feel that shirt sponsors are a great way to earn revenue for clubs, especially when you consider the ridiculous amount of money they spend buying players from clubs (millions of dollars per player) and their salaries (again, millions) and then operating costs and more.  I personally, don’t want my team looking like a tacky billboard, but one sponsor won’t sour the look of a uniform as long as it’s done tastefully.