According to an article in FT.Com article, Standard Chartered Bank joined the roll call of companies paying large sums to put their names on the shirts of leading European football clubs by agreeing a four-year sponsorship deal with Liverpool Football Club worth up to £80m (€91m).
The London and Hong Kong-listed bank made up for its failure to become Manchester United’s shirt sponsor earlier this year, paying broadly the same to Liverpool as the Premier League champions are receiving from Aon, the insurance company.
The £20m-a-year deal, though bigger than those secured recently by Juventus, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, demonstrates the gulf in the commercial clout between Europe’s elite clubs and the others.
Sports sponsorship experts doubted that the Liverpool deal pointed the way to a rise in deals across football. “This deal sets the bar for other elite clubs but will not affect the general market or second-tier properties,” said Phil Carling of Octagon, the sports marketing agency.
Premier League clubs believe the recession is doing nothing to diminish the appetite for their product. Their shirt deals had prompted club chairmen to reject Barclays’ £70m offer to renew their title sponsorship of the league for the next three seasons, even though the bank was proposing an increase of about 7 per cent on its existing deal, a person familiar with the situation said.
StanChart replaces Carlsberg, which had the option of renewing its Liverpool sponsorship that had reached £10m a year, but appears to have been unable to compete with the bank’s deal. The brewer is putting its money into the Football Association, which gives it sponsorship access to the England national team, Wembley stadium and the FA Cup.
Other bidders for the Liverpool sponsorship included Bwin, the Austrian online gaming group that ended up signing a deal with Real Madrid, one person close to the situation said. StanChart expects the deal to increase brand awareness in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
“Liverpool will do that in a cost-effective way,” StanChart said.
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