Manchester United will announce the largest sponsorship deal in football when they unveil a 4-year £80M deal with Chicago-based Aon Corp.
Aon engages in risk management, insurance brokerage services and consulting services worldwide (sound familiar?). But really, who the fuck cares? Outside of Carlsberg I can't think of a single shirt sponsor whose products I've consumed.
From the Guardian: "United have been scouring the globe for a new sponsorship deal since their current sponsors, AIG, the American insurance company, announced it would not be renewing its £14m-a-year deal when it expires at the end of the 2009-10 season."
So, US taxpayers are on the hook for another season, then the Glazers really get to cash in.
But here's a fun story that we hope is somehow symbolically prophetic.
The Aon Center in downtown Chicago was originally the Standard Oil Building. When it was completed in 1973 it was the world's tallest marble-clad building, with a facade of 43,000 slabs of Italian Carrara marble.
Too bad the marble used proved to be too thin. A year after the building's completion a slab detached and went through the roof of the nearby Prudential Center Annex. Eventually the entire building had to be refaced and from 1990-1992 every single marble slab was replaced with white granite at a total cost of $80M (over half the original cost of the building).
There's a little bit of fudging here as Aon didn't take over the name of the building until 1999 (and wasn't even the primary tenant for a couple of years after that).
But hey, Sir Alex is already showing an Achilles loyalty to aging players like Scholes and PFA Player of the Year Ryan Giggs, and if Ronaldo leaves, or if he dooesn't but the Portuguese split in the locker room festers... We're just saying, there might be cracks in the facade.
It's wishful thinking. But sometimes there is an ironic elegance to life.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
This Should Help The Debt Payments
Thursday, March 26, 2009
UF Quick Throw: Meet Your New Overlords
Perhaps this is a bit of a litmus test for where our global economy is heading: Manchester United has approached an Indian conglomerate to replace AIG as its sponsor. (Even more hilariously, the conglomerate is called "Tata Group.")
[Reuters]
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Good, The Bad, The WTF
I am of the opinion that things do not get lost in translation inasmuch as translation is imperfect because of the languages themselves. We are hard wired to run everything through our native tongue and to try to fit everything foreign to us in this context. The problem is that language is most often not a one to one construct. Sure, some things do translate directly--numbers being the most obvious--but so many other things do not. It's like the (incorrect) adage of Eskimos Inuits having 40 words for snow. Even if they only have two, that's one more than I, as a native English speaker of the American South, have.
I'm guessing then that the Swiss, when translating into English from whatever dialect of German, French, Italian or Romansch has been used, run into a similar problem. Even if it is only for a two word phrase.
Never has a shirt posed such a short question that is not easily answered. Hundreds of answers could be given for this seemingly innocuous question. The easiest, of course, is "why not?" But that gets you nowhere. One has to consider the framing of the question. Sure, the default I went to is for illegal or illicit drugs, but I'm not sure that is what the shirt is asking. Perhaps this was part of a governmental push to get people to support drug research within the country. Maybe this was a pharmaceutical's attempt to break into the seemingly impenetrable Swiss market "Why drugs? Because you will feel better". Maybe, even, this was Kevorkian's attempt at a inroad into the Swiss suicide market. Who knows? I don't. The shirt refuses to answer the question.
If this was indeed an attempt to make potential illicit drug users ask themselves some hard questions, why was this done in Switzerland? Switzerland has a reputation for being liberal in its views on drug policy. Not like the traditional Dutch policy, but much more permissive than the USA. There was a time in the early 90s, about the time this shirt was produced, when awareness about needles and the spreading of AIDS entered into the conversation. Could that be what this is all about? If so, why not just do a revised West Brom shirt from the '80s?
Furthermore, what reason to fight any drug use do the club have? This shirt is from Grasshopper Club in Zurich. Now, the only thing I've ever known a Grasshopper to beat is my sweet tooth, when I've eaten grasshopper pie. Surely, the fan base of this club must partake in hallucinogens to get behind such a wimpily named club, right? Come on, grasshoppers are one step up from dust motes when deciding how to name your club ferociously. I digress. It's better than the American way of naming all of your teams the same.
Who are we?
The Wildcats!
Who are we gonna beat?
The Wildcats!
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Good, The Bad, The WTF
Eintracht Braunschweig, or Brunswick as we English speakers call it, currently resides in the newly professional 3rd Liga in Germany. Currently, they sit 11th in the 20 team table, equidistant on points from promotion or relegation. Once upon a time, this was a team that won the Bundesliga. But that's not what this column is about. It's about the time they changed their badge, and changed how we look at soccer shirts in general.
I don't know about you, but when I buy a shirt, I usually like the sponsor logo, because I like it to be as "authentic" as possible. (Side note-today I am wearing a knockoff blackcurrant Arsenal shirt with "Fly Emirates" as the sponsor. Since O2 was the sponsor the last year at Highbury, you can draw your own conclusion as how far authenticity goes with me.) The shirt sponsor, as we know it today, goes back to the '70s. Heck, until Mike Georger forwarded over this article, I thought Kettering Town was the first team to have advertising on their kit. Turns out Eintracht Braunschweig had them beat by a few years. But, boy did they have to jump through some hoops to get there.
Eintracht Braunschweig was still high up in the Bundesliga in 1973, but were reeling from a bizarre scandal involving unscheduled, off-the-book, payments to its players. It seems the players were not getting paid to underperform, but instead to try harder than ever to win. This was a scandal, and players were suspended by the DFB and the club was hit with fines as well.
This hurt the team a lot. They were a smaller club fighting it out amongst the big ones. The loss of form from missing players kept the fans away,and when that loss was coupled with the above fines, it meant the club was hemorrhaging money. They needed cash, and fast. In stepped local boy Gunter Mast, the man who owned Jagermeister.
German rules at the time permitted only one logo on the shirt--the badge of the club. Eintracht Braunschweig's attempts to get the rule changed were rebuffed. The club then took the unusual step of changing their badge, from this
to this.
The above-linked article goes into pretty hilarious detail of how the DFB tried to keep the new shirts from seeing the light of day, and I would recommend reading it.
Anyway, when it came time to debut the shirts, this is how they looked:
The yellow one is the field shirt, while the blue one is the keeper's shirt.
Seven months after Eintracht Braunschweig debuted their new shirts, the DFB backed down and allowed clubs to sign shirt sponsorship deals. They flourished, of course, and now the only clubs that seem to be without sponsor all have "West" in their name.
Aa far as the shirts themselves, I think I would wear it. I wouldn't get near as big a kick out of it as I would have about 10 years ago when I could actually drink the stuff, but it is rather well done. It should be noted that the above shirt was the first attempt at putting the deer head logo on the shirt. Later, when the rules relaxed and the club could place an advertisement on the shirt, they did. This is the result:
Sneaky, huh? The badge itself did not change back until the '80s, so this is not really an extra large sponsor, it's the club logo with the sponsor's name underneath. Pretty tricky there, Germans.
One last, late addition here. I got the old photos of the shirts from this gallery. Click through to see some awesome sponsors, 'staches and hair.
Friday, September 12, 2008
West Ham to collapse financially (maybe not)
West Ham was dealt another blow today. Already reeling from losing their manager and signing up someone inexperienced, and foreign, to take over the job, the Hammers today have to face the prospect of having a shirt sponsor that can no longer afford to pay for the privilege.
XL, a travel company, signed a sponsorship deal with West Ham way back in February 2007. Their 2008 check, for £2.5 million, apparently has not come through yet. Which is bad because the company has gone into administration, the rough UK to US equivalent of bankruptcy. Oops.
So, it's by no means a death blow. That amount is roughly the cost of Dean Ashton's salary. With recent player sales, it is easily absorbed. Plus, another shirt sponsor can be easily found, and probably at an equivalent rate. No worries then, right?
Not so fast. The gem of the article is that one of the guarantors of an XL bank loan of over 200 million euros is Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, West Ham's chairman. Man, if they default, his credit is going to be ruined. I wonder if Free Credit Report can work that into a commercial?
The biggest question, in the end, to an '80s metalhead like myself is how does this affect Steve Harris? Will he be able to cope with having to replace this season's shirt with a new one after the sponsor is changed? I sure hope so.
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