Football sponsorship is facing a perfect storm. Amidst continuing global economic volatility, brands are thinking long and hard before signing deals. Yet there’s more competition for football sponsorship opportunities than ever before, not least because of the phenomenal rise of the women’s game during the past few years.
An ever growing number of clubs is fighting for a share of a cautious sponsorship market – a market which is, crucially, losing two particularly deep-pocketed players. The lucrative cryptocurrency sponsorship bubble has burst following the collapse of FTX. The Premier League is due to ban front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship from the 2026/2027 season; seven Premier League teams currently have betting firm logos emblazoned across their shirts.
What can clubs do? This was the hot topic when Cognizant sponsored a Roundtable at the recent Financial Times Business of Football Summit in London. Guests included commercial representatives from top clubs from the Premier League, the English Football League (EFL), Spain’s La Liga, and the German Bundesliga.
The Roundtable discussed how commercial directors can attract sponsors and boost ROI against clearly defined metrics by leveraging their richest source of data: their fanbase.
The value of first-party data in football
Most sponsors are gathering vast amounts of data on their own customers through loyalty schemes, newsletter sign-ups and by monitoring purchasing patterns. This first-party data empowers effective direct-to-consumer marketing, including targeted offers and upselling/cross-selling opportunities.
Brands want the same direct access to football fans, which is why clubs’ first-party data is a sponsorship gamechanger. Armed with deep insights into the demographics, geographics and preferences of a team’s fanbase, sponsors can create laser targeted direct marketing campaigns.
So brands are now asking clubs about the quality of their digital fanbase. How many of their fans are women over 40, Generation Alpha (everyone is fighting for the attention of Generation Alpha) or live in South East Asia? They can leverage such granular data to drive sales and revenue growth, attract new customers and retain existing ones.
Millions of followers, but who are they?
The problem is that clubs prioritise buying players, with the huge transfer fees that we all know about, over digital investment. They don’t collate detailed fan databases and the information they do have is siloed, with separate data for ticketing, email lists and merchandise sales.
Clubs might point to their multi-million followings on TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms, but this means very little to brands because they can’t target effective direct marketing campaigns at millions of people.
This absence of any single customer view is short-term thinking. A data-driven commercial strategy could pay off multiple times in the longer term, by attracting lucrative and enduring sponsorship deals.
Building a data strategy
So how can clubs acquire and harness the data they and their sponsors need to get to know their fans much better? Where they live, how old are they, how many matches they attend, whether they enjoy other sport (for cross-promotional opportunities)?
First, they should consolidate all their data from different touchpoints into a single view of groups of fans and individual fans: which matches they attend, what they buy from the club shop, whether they interact on social media and more. Over time clubs can enrich this by collaborating with other data sources, for example by discovering what their supporters do for a living through LinkedIn.
Teams must also understand that they can’t just sign a deal and leave everything to the sponsor. Brands will have a set of metrics to determine whether their sponsorship is adding significant value and clubs should focus on these relentlessly. Can they demonstrate direct links between brand sales and their fans, or that their supporters are spending more as a result of the sponsorship? Are they tracking new customer sign-ups – and retention – from their fanbase to their sponsor’s newsletter or loyalty schemes?
Clubs should live and breathe these metrics, providing high-quality data and developing dashboards to monitor delivery against a sponsor’s goals, to ensure that they are meeting the brand’s desired ROI and to make an ongoing business case for the partnership.
Cognizant can advise clubs on the necessary technical infrastructure to gather and leverage the fan data which will optimise sponsorship deals and help to finance those big-money transfer deals. Plus, the more a club knows about its fans, the better the experience they can provide for them on match days and beyond. It’s a win-win.
