Sport in general is very money oriented, weather it be football or Formula 1 for example. in this blog I am going to focus on the football side of sponsorships. Sponsorships are at the heart of the revenue the teams get and the difference between getting a big sponsorship and little is vital for how much income the teams could.
In the graph below it shows the revenue different football teams have made from their sponsors in the 2019/2020 season. Sponsorships is mainly about getting the brand on tv and shown to a wider audience. Therefore, there's a big gap between the "big 6" teams and the other teams in the Premier league this is down to the bigger teams who are fighting for the title tend to get better sponsorships as their games are more likely to be put on tv and have a bigger fan base. The money generated from the sponsor can go towards many things such as: new players, youth development, new staff, training equipment and much more.
Not everything is about how much revenue the team can make as for example talking to the head of commercial marketing at Southampton football (Tom Rose) i found out that as a club Southampton only make deals with sponsorships who share the sale values as the club do even if their is better money on the table. This is because the club doesn't want to lose its "family" feel and their ethos of improving their youth development.
Another reason why not only does it help the football team but the brand who sponsor them is that the fans of the football teams associate the brand who sponsor their team. I found this out by asking 5 Chelsea fans I know if they were more likely to buy a Samsung product like a phone or tv when they sponsored them. Below you can see the results which show that in fact this statement was true and with around 135 million chelsea fans globally this will also increase the sales for Samsung by sponsoring Chelsea FC.
Interesting. I agree with Tom Rose and the point he makes on the relationship between company values and the partner values, needing to correlate positively. This is becoming an ever more important consideration with partner selection in business, especially within ESG (environmental, social, governmental values).