Is your brand on a shirt a sure bet?

New season. New signings. New kit. And, increasingly, a new sponsor on the front of it.

I've been down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at the front of the shirts of all 92 professional football clubs in England. 26 have changed or newly sold their front-of-shirt position this season. Four, at the time of writing, remain open.

So nearly a third of professional men's clubs in England have experienced some form of movement around arguably their most prominent commercial asset in a single summer. That's got to be some sort of record!

There are some obvious reasons for that. The Premier League gambling ban has created an unusual amount of forced movement, but this is more than just a betting "bounce". Increasingly these deals are shorter term, which feels counterintuitive to what most people believe.

But the number wasn't actually what interested me most. Who is buying shirt sponsorship? And, more importantly, why are they buying it?

There are a lot of B2B businesses in the data. Technology. Financial services. Construction. Enterprise businesses. Companies whose potential customers represent a tiny fraction of the millions of people who will see their logo.

At first glance that can look slightly odd. Why spend millions putting your name in front of consumers who are never going to buy your product? Surely that's wastage?

But perhaps that's the wrong way to look at it. Because football can make a relatively unknown company look very big, very quickly.

Your customer might not be the fan sitting in row 19. It might be the CEO watching in Singapore. The procurement director in New York. A potential employee in London. An investor. A distributor.

Sponsoring a major football club provides an immediate signal of scale and credibility. Football can become an incredibly expensive shortcut. Rather than doing the harder work of building a brand, you can rent somebody else's fame.

Buy the shirt. Put the logo everywhere. Photograph the CEO holding it. Entertain some customers. Point to a very large media valuation. And declare success.

Maybe it was. But I'd want to know what happened next.

Creating the case for the chest position

I've always been slightly uncomfortable with our industry's obsession with media value. It's useful, of course it is, but it's very rarely the reason for a sponsorship. More often it's the justification.

If every football club sells its shirt through reach, impressions, broadcast exposure and media value, aren't they ultimately selling slightly different versions of the same thing?

The conversation eventually becomes: how many people, which markets, how many impressions, how much, and then, who is cheapest?

How you value the IP of the association is interesting, and often the "black magic" in the deal-making. The bit most people forget, in my experience, is that to actually benefit from the IP value of the club, you need to be actually associated. A logo placement for a season isn't going to do that. Smart and engaging activation might, and that's where the value is derived.

Then Arsenal and Emirates announced another renewal

The timing couldn't really have been better for my rabbit hole. Their relationship began in 2006 and the latest agreement takes it through to 2033. 27 years.

What's interesting is what time allows you to do differently. If you've bought a one or two-year front-of-shirt partnership, you simply can't behave like Emirates. The first 100 days become incredibly important.

In fact, I'd argue that a short-term partnership should probably be more focused, not less ambitious. Pick one or two things you want to change and go incredibly hard at them.

A longer partnership gives you a different opportunity. You can learn. You can build programmes rather than campaigns. And eventually you can build something short-term money struggles to buy: memory.

Back to kit, front, back, sleeve and training wear

Front-of-shirt might be the most visible asset. That doesn't automatically make it the best asset. For some B2B companies, do you really need another billion logo impressions? Or would you rather have access to 100 prospective CEOs?

The answer might still be front-of-shirt. For the right business it can be an extraordinary asset. But I'd want to know why before I knew where.

The £1m Shirt Test

When I'm asked to look at a partnership, whether someone is thinking about buying one, selling one or trying to work out why an existing one isn't delivering, I normally start in broadly the same place: the Bazballers 4P model. Purpose. Proposition. Positioning. Performance.

So here's a simple test. Imagine your business is about to spend £1m a year on the front of a football shirt. Ask five members of the leadership team these five questions independently:

If you get five different answers, I'd probably resolve that before negotiating the rights fee. Because the clock starts ticking the moment the contract is signed. Not at the first game.

Which takes me back to the 92 shirts

The length of the contract, the asset you buy and the way you activate it should all be designed around the job the partnership is supposed to do. And perhaps that's the bit we sometimes get backwards. We decide we want the shirt. Then work out what we're going to do with it.

So I'll leave brands with one question. If you removed the media valuation from your sponsorship business case tomorrow, could you still convince your board to invest?

And rights holders with another. If you removed the audience numbers from your sales deck, could you still convince the brand that your club can solve a problem for its business better than anyone else?

If either answer is uncomfortable, that's probably where the interesting conversation starts.

Russell James

Founder of Bazballers. Formerly Marketing Director at The FA, Sales and Marketing Director at the ECB, and ten years at P&G.

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