This year Manchester United took AON on as their new shirt sponsors, for a deal that tops all shirt deals in the English Premier League at £20m per season. It got me thinking about these jerseys in general and another one of the biggest teams in the world, Real Madrid featuring BWIN an online gambling site across the front of its jersey.
What if NFL Jerseys featured an online gambling site or a large corporation with business in several sectors such as risk management services and reinsurance? If it ever happened, I think we’d hear plenty of uproar, even if there was a concession that there would be less commercials.
But there’s rarely a soccer fan that I watch games with that will comment on what’s on front of that soccer jersey. Noticeable or not, the MLS has the NY Red Bulls and the Chicago Fire sport a Best Buy logo on the front of their jerseys. So the sponsored jersey has actually become a part of the soccer culture, without it you lose authenticity. So are scarfs, the eclectic pit behind the goal, and countless other cultural items.
It reminds me of some of the basic tenets of how to think about digital: to tap into cultural relevance, start at human truths and work out from there to see where there’s something a brand can tap into. So what’s your hypothetical marriage in our national sport leagues, McD’s and Dallas Cowboys or the NY Yankees and GE?
