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The cost of football kit and sponsorship deals has been rising rapidly. Manchester United set the tone when it switched from Nike to Adidas kits in 2015, in a deal worth around £75m a year. Barcelona did even better. By extending its Nike kit deal last month, the club more than doubled its annual revenue from kit to €150m a year.
A sponsorship deal concluded by Wolverhampton Wanderers with US-based pay day lender Money Shop has attracted widespread criticism. It featured on the West Midlands edition of Sunday Politics with one panelist describing Money Shop as akin to ‘modern day loan sharks.’
Today shirt sponsorship is an accepted part of football. Even the smallest non-league teams have their shirts sponsored by, say, a local pub or scaffolding company. However, it was not always the case and it was Jimmy Hill who made the breakthrough.
He brought in shirt sponsorship at Coventry City, threatening to rename them Coventry Talbot unless allowed to place logos and names on the club shirt. Television refused to show them, so Coventry wore a different strip when the cameras were in town.
Barcelona have a six year plan to become the first club with €1bn in revenues. Current revenues are €600m and it is felt necessary to lift them to counter the growing financial clout of the Premier League.
Thanks to new deals at Chelsea and Liverpool, Premier League shirt sponsorship deals have broken through the £200m barrier for the first time. The total value of all deals is now £218.65m. This is over twice the value of all deals in the German Bundesliga.
Leading football journalist David Conn provides an interesting account of the revival of Hereford United as Hereford FC. They have sold a thousand season tickets which is well above the norm for the level of non-league football they are now at. A recent away game at Malvern Town broke their attendance record with over 2,000 present.
Dafabet are to be the new shirt sponsors for Sunderland. The main markets for the eGaming company are in Asia and the UK.
Until the end of last season, they were the main shirt sponsors for Aston Villa. They are also shirt sponsors for Blackburn Rovers.
There is a lot of detailed and interesting information in this report from Forbes about which clubs get the big sponsorship money and how the picture is changing.
The biggest source of revenue is shirt sponsorship (or jersey sponsorship as this report calls it). That is followed by stadium naming rights which have become an increasingly lucrative source of revenue.
Chelsea have secured the second biggest shirt sponsorship deal in English football history. They have agreed a contract worth £40m a year with the Yokohama Rubber Company to start next season. The club regards it as another important step towards being self-financing and compliant with financial fair play rules.
Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeou has claimed in an interview with the Financial Times weekend magazine that Barcelona are in the best economic position in their history. Annual revenues have tripled in a decade to €530m. Only Real Madrid does better with €604m.
Barca probably have the lowest average ticket prices of any of the top 15 clubs in Europe. However, after eschewing commercial shirt sponsorships for many years, it is now highly reliant on the €30m a year it gets from its Qatari shirt sponsor.