Kit sponsors can offer fond memories but betting logos would not be missed
Forty years ago this week, Liverpool announced the first ever top flight sponsorship deal in the UK with Hitachi – £100,000 over two years. For the 1979 version of Twitter – presumably just people shouting in the street – this story must have trended. Football fans don’t like change, and a hifi manufacturer on the front of a pure red Liverpool kit, while everyone else was clear and unbranded, must have hurt.
Without radio phone-ins people will have been forced to write angry letters somewhere, or – worse – actually spoken to each other about it face to face. Was this the first moment where someone claimed “the game’s gone”? You can just imagine Steve in Birkenhead claiming this was “the tip of the iceberg … soon Toblerone will sponsor the ball and change its shape and the game won’t be gone, it will be WELL AND TRULY gone”. The game has gone many times since, now it goes on a weekly basis – yet it still seems to be here.
In fact, Kettering Town had already broken the mould three years earlier. On 24 January 1976, they took to the field with “Kettering Tyres” emblazoned across their shirts for a game against Bath City in the Southern League. Their chief executive Derek Dougan had done a four-figure deal, much to the annoyance of the FA who told him to remove them. The FA had banned shirt sponsorship in 1972. Dougan tried to pull a fast one by changing the logo to “Kettering T” – claiming the T was for Town rather than Tyres, but he had no such luck. Nevertheless the FA wilted from pressure from other clubs and lifted the ban in 1977. Forty years later and Liverpool’s deal with Standard Chartered is worth around £40m for this season alone – although given that £40m can only get you four-fifths of Sean Longstaff, perhaps sponsorship hasn’t grown as wildly as you might imagine.
This month the big sponsorship story has been Huddersfield Town. The club joined with the bookmakers Paddy Power to release a kit with a hen-dosized sash across their strip. It was hideous. As a publicity stunt it worked a dream – social media meltdown, the FA contacting the club, before the big reveal of a sponsorless shirt. That happened a day or two earlier than planned because the club were getting worried about the adverse publicity.
There is clearly a serious issue with the amount of gambling in football. As Rob Davies reported last week, half of Premier League shirts will have a betting company’s logo this season – with 17 of the 24 Championship clubs following suit. To give Paddy Power some credit, if that’s allowed, along with Ladbrokes’ owner GVC, they have called for an end to shirt sponsorship deals – the former also won’t advertise on perimeter hoardings at grounds. Clearly they know what they’re doing – throwing the gauntlet down to less well known gambling firms to follow suit – and they can get their publicity in other ways. But if it means kids see less of it, along with no whistle-to-whistle gambling ads on TV that comes into place this year, that is a positive.
The industry bankrolls not only football clubs, but all parts of the game. I’ve done radio phone-ins on gambling addiction, thanking callers for devastating personal accounts of their addictions before throwing to an ad break filled with odds, offers, accas and free bets. The single biggest problem the addicts told me was that some firms would not leave them alone, even after cancelling all their accounts. It’s a competitive market, but surely there’s enough to go round while letting the most vulnerable deal with their problems with the space they need. I don’t write from a lofty perch here. I like gambling, even if I only lose about a hundred quid a year betting on long shots in the golf majors. I’ve worked for gambling companies in the past.
Since Huddersfield’s “unsponsoring” announcement, Newport County and Motherwell have followed suit. And while the kits look good, there’s a nostalgia to sponsors that I’m not sure I want to lose. It’s how I remember kits. As a kid, I didn’t know the difference between a sponsor and a kit manufacturer. As far as I knew from all my extensive Panini ’87 swap deals, AVCO made West Ham kits and WANG Oxford. Everton were NEC and Arsenal were JVC. Perry Groves recounted this week how the players got half-price TVs from the deal. He would buy a load and sell them to his mates – cost price, not for profit!
I remember seeing an advert with Jeff Goldblum drinking Holsten Pils and my brain completely failing to work out the connection between that and Tottenham Hotspur. I didn’t know who Jeff Goldblum was. I didn’t really know what beer was. And I couldn’t for the life of me link that to the glorious Hummel/Holsten late-80s Glenn Hoddle kit. I am a sucker for those chevrons.
I remember the unbridled joy of getting the full Spurs kit and proudly wearing it for about four weeks solid. It was the Gascoigne, Lineker, Holsten shirt – chevrons down the shorts too. I spent the late-80s and early-90s entirely dressed in Spurs and Cambridge. I don’t have a clue who designed the Cambridge ones but the sponsors are etched on my mind, from Lynfox to Howlett … then, as we went up the leagues, Fujitsu – a foreign company! Since then we’ve returned to steel works and skip manufacturers – proper League Two sponsors. All the way through I couldn’t tell you who actually designed them – until now. We have chevrons.
Perhaps the greatest kits of them all are unsponsored. Barcelona – until they went nice with Unicef and then gear changed to Qatar – Denmark ’86, Brazil 1970. Things of real beauty. If I had one hope for this season, it’s that teams wear their home shirt whenever they can. The unnecessary use of third kits might be good for marketing, but really the game is “well and truly gone” if Liverpool choose to run around looking like 11 Stabilo orange marker pens when they could be in red.
Was there a better kit spectacle than the Copa América final this summer? Two sides, in their classic kits – the yellow and blue of Brazil versus the sash of Peru. That is a sash everyone can get behind.