If we have reached 'peak football' how should brands react?

For many Brits Bill Shankly’s quote that “football isn’t a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that” still has a ring of truth to it. Football is a national passion with thousands playing in parks each weekend, millions attending games each week and many more watching or reading about their team. Football is such a passion in Britain that Sunderland attracts more fans each week than AC Milan, and even Brighton’s gates are bigger than Villareal’s. With this level of interest it seems unsurprising that brands are prepared to spend millions on building an association with the game however cluttered it might be. In fact Barclays are reported to have spent ￡120m across their three year Premiership deal and Budweiser ￡24m on their FA Cup sponsorship of the same length.

However, scale of interest isn’t always enough to justify a decent return on investment on an association. In the 1980s football was a national passion?—?millions watched the exploits of Lineker and the like. Yet brands placed a far lower value on any association. The scale of the interest didn’t appeal to them because of the negative connotations of hooliganism. They took the view that for any sponsorship to command significant sums it had to deliver both scale and positive associations.

This is a pressing issue as the associations with the Premiership are evolving. Hooliganism may have been stamped out but other negative connotations are growing. We asked 300 people an open-ended question about what they associated with Premiership footballers. There were a broad range of negative associations from greedy to stupid to arrogant.

Most troubling for sponsors is that the most common negative association, accounting for half of all the comments, was that Premiership footballers are rich or over-paid. This spontaneous negativity is unique to football. For example, according to our study leading tennis players are associated with far more positive terms, whether that be speed, fitness or athleticism. When money is mentioned it’s in far more neutral terms?—?they’re referred to as ‘rich’ rather than ‘over-paid’.

The general negativity towards football is bad enough for sponsors. The negative influence of money is especially troublesome for sponsors. Normally a sponsor’s cash is seen as beneficial to an event or sport. In our study we found that consumers were twice as likely to agree, rather than disagree, that sponsors benefit events in general by helping fund them. However, this isn’t the case in football. Additional money is seen in a negative light?—?damaging the fabric of the game. When we asked consumers about the role of sponsors specifically with regards football the percentage who thought they had a positive effect dropped from 44% to 29%.

So what is the likely outcome of this? Brands might start viewing the high prices football sponsorships command as over-priced. Why pay millions to associate with a sport whose negative connotations are growing? Instead, sponsors are likely to start moving investment into other, less cluttered areas where they might benefit from greater positive associations. In a few years we might look back at 2016 as the year the football bubble finally burst.

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