Football Sponsorship
Best Football Players Attract Sponsors
Years ago, football, like most sports was an amateur affair. Footballers all had other “real” jobs and played at the weekends or in the evenings. But, as with all things, along came the money men and the game gradually evolved into the cash cow it is today. Footballers as individuals are now the rock stars of sport and their teams fabulously wealthy from huge sponsorship deals. So with famous players and top-performing teams, it’s of no surprise that the top teams and leagues attract the top sponsorship purses.
Football Sponsorship: Are You Kidding Me?
A typical example of this would be the player Zlatan Ibrahimović. He’s a top tier footballer originally from Sweden. Not so long ago he left Manchester United and made his way to play with LA Galaxy in Los Angeles. At the same time, he announced a new individual sponsor. Bethard is a Swedish betting operator and the deal is worth 8 to 10 million Euros per year. And that’s just for his signature!
Big Online Casinos Sponsor Major Football Clubs
One of the first major casino/football sponsorship deals was way back in 2002. By today’s mad money standards, a little piddler of a deal. But never the less, Betfair and Fulham tied the knot. Moving on, Everton managed to secure a whopping £75 million from SportPesa. Then we have the well known Austrian casino brand, Bwin, who has teamed up with AC Milan worth $12 million. They also teamed up with Manchester United for the bonkers sum of $24 million. Finally, we should save a mention for the Turkish state-owned lottery company, Spor Toto, who decided to invest $25 million in the top tier super league,
Football Sponsorship: The 2018 World Cup in Russia
The World cup is the oasis for top-level sponsorship. This is where the best and the biggest deals go down. In truth, with the size of the numbers involved it’s always difficult to state that everything is above board. Football sponsorship is perhaps not the best example of transparency in action. Never the less. this is the real world we live in. If we look at the World Cup held in Russia in 2018, we can see the sheer scale of sponsorship numbers.
The World’s Biggest Competition
As you probably already know the World Cup is held every four years. All the teams are recognized by FIFA. And they all play in a number of rounds to be able to hold the World Cup, previously called the Jules Rimet Trophy, aloft. As a worldwide televised event of the world’s most popular sport, the World Cup is a veritable magnet for sponsorship. According to Forbes Magazine, the World Cup is right up there, slightly behind the Olympics and the Super Bowl in terms of sponsorship dollars generated via sponsors.
Football Sponsorship: World Cup Numbers
Though the real numbers are always slightly obscured, according to The New York Times, the Russian World Cu generated around $6.1 billion in revenue. That’s $1.3 more than from the last World Cup in 2014 in Brazil. The lion’s share is generated via television rights, standing at around $3 billion. The actual sponsors contributed more than $1.45 billion. It should be noted that most of this sponsorship money came from Chinese companies. They are eager to promote their brands across the globe. FIFA also gained a nice chunk of change from the online video gaming company, EA Sports. They generously contributed around $160 million to the cause.
Casino Sponsorship is Coming
With all this sponsorship money floating around, it’s only a matter of time before online casinos move up a gear and go from local sponsorship to the international level. We are unsure about the whole sponsorship issue with football. Such huge sums of money being directed at just a few top tier teams tend to skew the whole football market place. This in turn leads to too much emphasis being placed on just a few top teams and players.
Football Sponsorship: Entitled Players
There is certainly no “trickle-down effect”. Let’s face it, none of this money going on to help teams further down the leagues. To that end, the top teams continue to get stronger as they have the purses to be able to afford top-level players. Thus those teams below get more and more left behind. They end up being less and less competitive. We believe that in the long run, top tier football will eat itself, as it becomes a bore-fest of overpaid entitled snowflakes. After all, it’s just human nature that if you receive hundreds of thousands of dollars every week, then the incentive to continue to strive for optimal performance is surely going to be weaker than those on much, much less. Just saying…
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