On July 13, Chelsea scored three goals against Paris Saint-Germain to win the Club World Cup. In addition to guaranteeing the title – PSG was the favorite of the tournament – and a gigantic gold trophy, took home about $ 640 million.
Club leaders will be grateful for payment. Attentive observers may have noticed that the front of Chelsea’s shirt is blank. Since an American consortium bought the club in 2022, the owners have sought a lucrative sponsorship agreement, with various results. Chelsea pairs, meanwhile, are full of money: PSG allegedly receives about $ 70 million a year from Qatar Airways. (Both the club and the sponsor are owned by the Qatar government.)
For Joey D’Erso, journalist of The Times, these details matter. In “More Than a Shirt,” he argues that football shirts – and especially the names of brands that appear on them – can say a lot about economics and geopolitics. Football leaders stood out in the commercialization of the sport, he argues, but failed to protect him from questionable enterprises.
A generation behind, shirt sponsorship was simpler than the impediment rule. Consumer goods companies paid clubs for the chance to reach local fans. At the beginning of the Premier League era in 1992, Liverpool was sponsored by a beer brand, and Arsenal, by an electronics company. But as football became more popular globally, the most successful team shirts attracted a wider variety of sponsors.
D’Erso describes an agreement made in 2006, when a German First Division team, Schalke 04, changed its main sponsor of a local insurer to Gazprom, a Russian gas producer. This lucrative agreement was a deviation from the norm. “No one watching … will go out and buy a cubic meter of gas from Gazprom,” says the author.
Instead, an energy expert says Gazprom sought Schalke to improve Russia’s image as “the friendly neighbor.” It worked. During the course of the agreement, a growing portion of the German energy matrix was intended for Russian natural gas.
The strongest material in the book shows how some leaders clubs accepted sponsorship money without proper checking. In 2021, Chelsea signed an agreement with Leyu Sports, an Asian betting company. The players were forced to speak Chinese in promotional videos, and the company’s logo was shown at the team’s stadium.
But when he tried to track the company that said he had brokered the agreement, D’Erso could not prove his existence. Photos of your employees were images of the image bank. “Simply, no one has an idea of who is managing these companies,” he says. Without this information, teams do not know what they are promoting, even if they are practicing “ignorance instead of intentional mistake”.
Football has embraced cryptocurrency schemes with similarly disabled scrutiny. In 2021/22, 19 of the 20 Premier League clubs announced a cryptocurrency product for their fans. These clubs have collaborated with cryptocurrency startups to create non -fungible “tokens” that should be collectible.
D’Erso pointed out that the cryptocurrency industry has settled in football because it realized it was “the cheapest way to advertise for young men,” a group more inclined to take financial risks. Prices soon plummeted (although cryptocurrencies have recovered since then).
D’Erso talks to irritated and embarrassed fans. In the absence of sufficient regulation, some believe they were explored by their clubs. Others are surprised that players who considered “legitimate” would endorse such risky schemes.
Some are obliged to criticize the sponsors. Earlier this year, Arsenal fans asked the club to terminate its agreement with the Rwanda Tourism Council, after a rebel group supported by the government had invaded the east of Congo. (Countries have since signed a fragile truce.)
D’Erso argues that few, if any, fans want to “deal with complex geopolitical issues.” However, “More Than a Shirt” shows why geopolitics continues to invade the field.
From The Economist, translated by Marcos Guedes, published under license. The original article in English can be found at www.economist.com.
