Sponsoring a football player vs sponsoring a football club
By Abraham Mercado
Football, apart from being the world’s most popular sport, is also a big financial opportunity for companies looking to promote their brand. Nowadays football players are not just people who play football, they are also worldwide celebrities and influencers with millions of followers. Realizing the enormous audience reached by football athletes, some of the largest corporations in the world have started sponsoring football clubs and individual players, particularly with the coming up World Cup which represents a golden opportunity to impact billions of people that are going to be tuning in.
When a company sponsors a football club it’s usually because they aim to get to this club’s fanbase as potential new customers, whereas when they sponsor a player, their target audience are his social media followers, and their main goal is to promote a product using the player as the brand’s image.
So, is it better for a company to sponsor a football player or a football club?
Sponsorship can be defined as a mutually profitable business relationship between two interrelated parties. There are different kinds of sponsorships in sports, for instance, if a company is the main sponsor of a football club it means that their logo will be at the front of the club’s jersey and sometimes even their stadium could be named after the company, as it happened recently with Barcelona FC and Spotify when they struck a deal worth up to €280 million (US$308 million) on a four year contract according to the Catalan radio station RAC1 and saw their iconic stadium rebranded as “Spotify Camp Nou”.
When a company sponsors an athlete and uses him as their brand’s image to promote a certain product, it’s because they want their fans to think “If my favorite player uses this product, then so should I”. However, it can also happen the other way around, as was the case in last year's Euros when Cristiano Ronaldo moved aside two bottles of Coke at a press conference and urged his fans to drink water instead. Subsequently, Coca-Cola shares dropped $5 billion dollars because of this.
Whether it’s better to sponsor a football player or a football club is hard to say, it depends on how important the football club is (Success on the pitch, number of fans worldwide, market value) and how popular and influential is the player (number of followers on social media, background, and country of origin to reach a specific audience, charisma). “To decide between a football property or a player it will depend on your marketing campaigns goals and also your budget, usually team’s properties are a bigger investment and longer term strategy”, said Dario Brignole’s Shine’s CEO.
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