Premier League shirt sponsorship: a walk through history

Football and sponsorship have long walked hand in hand. From Pele and Maradona’s Puma boots to the arrival of the Premier League, which took sponsorship deals and the game in general to new heights.

Today, shirt sponsorship is an integral part of any club’s input and over the last few years there’s been a real shift in the type of sponsors clubs are endorsing. 

2020/21: All about the betting

Today, across the Premier League and Football League, there’s been a real swing towards sports betting websites teaming up with clubs as their shirt sponsors, in deals that are worth hundreds of millions of pounds to clubs.

In the Premier League for the 2020/21 season, eight of the 20 Premier League sides are sponsored by betting firms, including major names such as Betway and BetVictor, while there are dozens more across the Championship and League One.

It’s developed a real tight-knit relationship between betting and football and one in which perhaps neither could live without. On websites like Freebets UK there are now thousands of customers who explore football markets every day alongside bookmakers themselves, with these companies not appearing on advertising hoardings around the ground.

It’s not always been that way though, it wasn’t until the 2002/03 season when betting companies began to emerge as shirt sponsors for clubs. Fulham became the first, striking a deal with Betfair, and it changed the game forever. 

The landscape was very different then. At that point, there were a large number of sponsors associated with mobile phones, including Arsenal and O2, Birmingham City and Phones4U, while Manchester United had a major deal with Vodafone. Middlesbrough were also sponsored by Dial-a-Phone.

Alcohol was also prominent, with Liverpool and their famous Carlsberg sponsor, alongside Leeds United and Strongbow. That has started to seep out of the game today, with only Leicester having an association with alcohol on their shirt, that being Saigon Beer and as a sleeve sponsor. 

The turn of the millennium

Going back to the 2000/01 season and the Premier League was getting into its stride as a global product. 

Four of the 20 pubs were sponsored by beer brands, while it was also the final year of Leicester’s long standing relationship with Walkers crisps.

It was a real mixed bag, pardon the pun, with West Ham sponsored by Dr Martens and Manchester City were backed by Eidos, with Lara Croft making much of the promotion surrounding that.

In that 2000/01 season the breakdown of businesses sponsoring Premier League clubs was: 

●     Electronics: 20%

●     Communications: 20%

●     Food & Drink: 25%

●     Motoring: 15%

●     Finance: 10%

●     Other: 10%

Electronics and communications started to dominate from there on in and as the league got bigger, it was those with the biggest financial clout that could afford to sponsor Britain’s top flight teams.

The birth of the Premier League

It certainly wasn’t that way eight years prior, however. In fact, sponsors were almost exclusively British businesses or large electronics companies that were prominent on the British market. 

Arsenal were sponsored by popular Japanese electronics firm JVC, with Manchester United, who won the first Premier League title doing so with Sharp electronics emblazoned across their shirt.

Interestingly, the beginnings saw many sponsors local to their club. Fisons sponsored Ipswich Town, Peugeot, who had a large factory in Coventry, sponsored their home club, while Brother, a prominent business in Manchester sponsored the blue half of the city, with Sheffield United, Oldham Athletic, Norwich City and Southampton all had local businesses associated with them. 

An awful lot has changed since those days and it will be interesting to see how sponsorship develops over the coming years, with the likes of Visit Rwanda and Angry Birds rearing their heads in recent years, making for a more global, more online Premier League than ever before.