EXCLUSIVE: Premier League defies recession with record £100m shirt deals
By Alex Miller and Nick Harris
29 July 2010
NB: This story has been amended on 13 August 2010 due to Wolves informing us their current shirt deal is worth £1.1m for the 2010-11 season, not £400,000 as originally reported. We apologise for the earlier error.
The Premier League’s 20 clubs for the 2010-11 season have negotiated themselves shirt sponsorship deals collectively worth £100.45m for the campaign, according to exclusive research undertaken by sportingintelligence.
This is a record figure for a single season for a single division in English football; indeed no division in world football has been known to surpass this level, and with bonus clauses in some of the Premier League deals, the figure could move further above the £100m mark.
The £100.45m in the Premier League for 2010-11 tops the previous record of £98.7m, set by Germany's top division in the Bundesliga in 2009-10. That figure of £98.7m was a 'peak calculation figure' using pound-to-euro exhange rates at their narrowest in April 2010.
A report by the sports consultancy group StageUp in April this year found that the "big five" leagues from England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France generated 365m euros in shirt sponsorship deals in 2009-10, with Germany being the No1 nation in gross revenues , with 6.3m euros per club on average (113.4m euros, then £98.7m). English Premier League clubs collectively were No2, followed by clubs in Serie A (Italy), La Liga (Spain) and Ligue 1 (France).
The English 2010-11 deals researched by this website, broken down into annual sums on a club-by-club basis in a table in our features section here today, are collectively worth £28.11m more than last season’s total of £72.34m, with the English deals, for now, pipping the previous German record.
This recession-defying uplift in value is mainly down to some big gains by individual clubs, such as Liverpool’s new deal with Standard Chartered, worth £20m a year - a £12.55m per year increase on their previous deal - and Manchester United’s deal with Aon, worth £20m, which represents a £6m annual increase on the previous deal with AIG.
Yet there have been gains across the division, with a number of new entrants to this market, including FxPro Financial Services Ltd, which will sponsor both Aston Villa and Fulham, and the most recent newcomer to Premier League football, Wonga.com, which is an online "short-term lender" that in a less politically correct era would have been called a loan shark.
When signing the deal (worth at least £500,000 and maybe as much as £650,000) earlier this month, Errol Damelin, the founder and CEO of Wonga.com, said: "We are still relatively young but we're growing fast and have big ambitions, just like Blackpool. Their rise through the divisions and fairytale promotion last year was an inspiration for football fans all over the country, so it's a great fit for Wonga."
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