If you ever watched a professional club football match, you may have noticed a few things straight off the bat: company logos on both team’s jerseys, a sporting brand such as Nike or Adidas also on the jerseys and advertising boards on the sidelines. You may have also noticed player’s names on the back of their jersey’s. Based on these observations, you can conclude football has a lot of ad space!
In the last couple of decades, advertising in professional football has become a huge business. This is mainly because of football’s ability to reach multiple fans around the world via TV and the Internet. For example, the 2011 Champions League final between Manchester United and Barcelona had an estimate of 178.7 million TV viewers across the world. This is approximately 70 million more viewers than the most watched Super Bowl of all time.
Generally, revenue for a football club comes from three sources: match day ticket sales on the ground, TV broadcasting rights, and commercial sources. Commercial sources include revenue from sponsorship income and merchandising sales. Most professional football clubs have one or more corporate sponsors.
Emirates Airlines sponsors Arsenal Football Club
Arsenal as an Example
As an example, let us look at Arsenal F.C. based in London, England (my favorite pro football club). Arsenal is sponsored by Emirates Airlines (which also sponsors A.C Milan and Paris St. Germain). This is obvious for two folds: the large print of the phrase “Fly Emirates” on their player’s jerseys and the fact the name of their stadium is called “The Emirates”. Arsenal moved to this 60K capacity stadium back in 2006 in order to increase their ticket sales. Their previous stadium could only hold approximately 38K. Finding finances for the stadium proved to be very difficult for Arsenal since they did not have enough funds to pay for the stadium’s yearly mortgage. Emirates Airline signed a 15-year contract with Arsenal estimated at $152 million. Under this deal, the airliner secured naming rights to the stadium and shirt sponsorship with the club. Overall, this sponsorship deal accounts to approximately 20% or more of Arsenal’s yearly revenue since 2006.
Emirates Stadium
Shirt Sales and Players Income
Shirt sales and brand merchandising is also important revenue for football clubs. Recently, David Beckham signed a 5 month contract with Paris St. Germain at the age of 37. The club estimates shirt sales of 22 million dollars worth for his short stay based on the orders they received. The German kit supplier Adidas estimates that 10 million Beckham replica jerseys has been sold since his 20 year playing career began, which approximately sums up to a billion US dollars.
David Beckham signs for PSG
Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are today known as the best football players in the world. Their yearly salary at their club is approximately 13 million dollars each. However, their salary was only one third of their total earnings of last year. The rest of their incomes are generated from sponsorship deals from companies such as Nike, Adidas, Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
The influence of Corporate Sponsors
At first glance, the power of corporate sponsorship in football might not be so obvious. I didn’t realize this influence until Standard Chartered Bank forced Liverpool Football Club to apologize for their player’s actions over an alleged racism row. Initially, the club was standing by their player’s action until the bank expressed its disappointment with the entire situation. Standard Chartered gives Liverpool 30 million dollars a year. This is approximately 11% of Liverpool’s yearly revenue. No wonder why Liverpool Football Club listened.
