Why football clubs need sponsorship

In the modern game, unfortunately for the most loyal grassroots fans, football clubs are before anything else a business. They need to succeed on the pitch in order to stay functional, and the transfer market can bankrupt clubs or give them huge profits. Clubs like Southampton and Leicester have banked incredible amounts of profit on buying a player and then selling him a couple of seasons later. Football clubs need money for obvious reasons. Stadiums need to be built, training facilities need to be erected, staff needs to be paid, facilities need to be cleaned, etc. Just like a business, a football club comes with a lot of costs.

These costs need to be covered by profits and these profits need to be then invested into the club in order for it to improve. Ticket and shirt sales contribute a lot to this, especially for the big teams, but this isn’t always the case. In Germany, season tickets are much cheaper, even for the top teams. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the most currently successful German teams do not charge much for their season tickets because they do not want to fund the club through fan’s contributions. A fan should not have to pay to support their team, so clubs have to look to different avenues for money.

Help with clubs expenses

Sponsorships then step forward. Smaller clubs can totally depend on sponsorships for their entire existence. Companies will pay a certain quantity in order to advertise their slogans on the front of their shirts, because of the vast number of people that will wear these tops. The coverage that this advertisement allows is impressive, so it is logical that companies are looking to do this. You often see online betting companies like Findbettingsites.co.uk and Bet365 taking out shirt advertisements as a means to advertise their betting services. These advertisements attract large a huge amount of views and often results in increased live match betting.

Richer clubs still need sponsorships as this can allow them access to things they otherwise would not have. When sporting companies sponsor them, they can also offer opportunities such as the Emirates Cup, which puts more competitive football and prize money at clubs’ fingertips. They can also get access to exclusive equipment, as is the case with the latest technologies. When the company that sponsors a few teams and they all get access to the latest technology, then that team has a competitive advantage over all of their opposition. Dortmund are a team that have developed a training system with technology intertwined at every step. This proves that more technical training that sponsorships can offer can directly translate to performances on the pitch.

Sponsors can also take care of things such as shirts and transport for teams on some of their trips, so it can just be more convenient for football clubs to get such a sponsorship rather than for purely financial reasons. However, quite simply, football clubs operate like businesses, and to not impose too heavily on their fans, need to make money from other sources in order to fund all the spending that comes logically with owning a football club: transfer fees, shirt manufacturing and distribution, transport for staff and players, staff and player wages, scouting future stars.