English version:No (shirt sponsorship) Logo

The game played on Saturday September 13^th 2008 at the Hawthorns between West Bromwich Albion and West Ham United (which West Brom won 3-2) should go down in history. Many people may well ask ‘why?’ Is it because the Hammers were watched for the first time by their incumbent manager, Gianfranco Zola? Or is it that West Brom secured their first win following the club’s return to the Premier League?

Actually, it is neither;

The most significant aspect of the game is that, for the first time since 1978, a game in England’s top flight was played by clubs neither of which had a shirt sponsor.

Adding further significance to the absence of corporate names and logos from each club’s shirts was the fact that it effectively signalled the beginning of the economic downturn’s impact on football.

West Brom’s previous shirt sponsorship deal, with T-Mobile, finished at the end of their successful 2007-2008 promotion season, and the club have been trying and failing ever since to secure a new shirt sponsor. West Ham meanwhile, started the season sponsored by XL Airlines although the company soon became a victim of difficult trading conditions and went into liquidation. Unlike Albion however, United have been able to find a new sponsor: SBOBET, an online gambling company.

There are a number of interesting subtexts though to the Baggies v Hammers match and their sponsorship deals. Above all, it demonstrates that financial hardship elsewhere in industry has had a knock-on effect for football. Even though the value of such sponsorship revenues pales by comparison with earnings generated through ticket sales and television contracts, a shirt deal is still a helpful source of revenue; very helpful if you are a Manchester United or Chelsea, when contract values can hit £50 million+ for a three year deal. Clubs like West Brom are (were!) more likely to receive somewhere in the region of £3million for a similar deal, yet this is an amazing amount when one considers that it is simply a name and logo on a shirt that we are talking about.

The mistake that Albion made was in assuming that sponsorship values were holding up in the face of looming economic problems, when it began negotiating a new deal with a prospective sponsorship last summer. What the club wanted and what one of their prospective sponsors wanted to pay were significantly different, and so now the club now finds itself without a deal. West Ham did not make the same mistake, signing an 18 month deal with SBOBET worth an estimated £2million. However, the deal is worth considerably less than that which they had previously agreed with XL, estimated as being worth around £7.5million for a three year deal.

With corporations around the world cutting-back on their sponsorship commitments, football shirt deals would therefore appear to be on the frontline of the downturn. However, consider this: Manchester City is thought to be on the verge of announcing an eye-watering shirt sponsorship deal with Etihad Airlines that surpasses Manchester United’s current deal with AIG (thought to have been worth £56million). United too have apparently fallen foul of the downturn, now that AIG is effectively a US government-owned organisation. Yet rumour has it though that United will trump City’s new shirt contract by agreeing a new shirt sponsorship deal, with Saudi Telecom.

What therefore appears to be happening is that the market for shirt sponsorships is polarising. Much has been made of the differential effects the economic recession is having. Nowhere is this clearer than in English football; while most clubs now find themselves scrambling about to generate whatever they can by selling their shirt space, the bigger clubs – clearly safe ports in an economic storm – continue to attract ever larger revenues from international corporations. As the sponsorship market splits, and as that space on the front of our favourite clubs’ shirts becomes a battlefield of corporate interest and economic concern, purists are simply left to reflect on one bright September afternoon in the West Midlands when, for 90 minutes at least, they were able to hark back to yesteryear and a time when there really were no logos.