Rivalry in football, the sponsor's derby - To what extent can sponsors handle rivalry in football?

Résumé du document

Sponsoring is often seen as an opportunity to a company to get involved in a sports club, an athlete or an association. In football, the club associates its image, values, history to the sponsor. Furthermore, a paper published by Gwinner and Eaton in 1999 showed that in customers minds an association is made between the sponsored object and the sponsoring brand.

In football the object can be the team shirt and the brand, a famous brewery for instance. Actually, there is a kind of image transfer. In other words, when someone sees a brand logo, he will have an effective response to this brand, linked with his own cultural values and behaviors.

Indirect transfer is the result of pairing repeatedly objects and brands and has nothing to do with a natural memory association of the customer. In football, we can say that there are many repeated pairings between brands and objects, so we clearly are in a situation of indirect transfers

Extraits

[...] Furthermore, in the same study it is shown that there are 2 more factors that make the sponsorship efficient or not: The functional fit is when there is a possible use of the sponsor's product by the sponsored object. For instance, Olympic French team is sponsored by Powerade, a beverage they use. The image fit is when there is a link between the image of the object and the brand. This study shows that functional fit is much more efficient towards the customer than the other one. But everything in this study mentions the benefits of sponsoring that is sometimes seen as philanthropy. [...]

[...] Bibliography/webography 1. Flipside of the Sponsorship Lars Bergkvist, Journal of advertising Research, March “Colors and Scarves: The Symbolic Consumption of Material Possessions by Soccer Christian Derbaix, LABACC, Catholic University of Mons 3. [...]

[...] A is defined as a sporting fixture between 2 teams that are geographically close, in the same city or the same region. This was originally a term used in equestrian vocabulary but is extended to all sports now. There are plenty of derbies all around the world, in most capital cities. Here is a table with the average top 10 of biggest rivalries in soccer, according to many websites and articles. We could very easily find 15 to 20 more derbies, but in this top 10 there are clearly the most dangerous ones. [...]

[...] This cultural association is not the same all over the world. Beer is a popular and quite cheap beverage, that's why it was and still is associated with soccer. In France, the 1991 law regulates alcohol advertising. This is the reason why French soccer teams don't have beer sponsors on their shirts. However, in the UK alcohol ads are everywhere on streets billboards, TV ads and even on team shirts. As we can see on the table on the right, most English Premier league clubs are sponsored by beer brands. [...]

[...] We can say that it is a profitable sponsorship for the company. But returning to the main issue, I will now take the example of the Glasgow derby to emphasize this. Glasgow Rivalry To illustrate the difficulty to sponsor rival teams, I chose to focus my thesis on the analysis of the situation in the most controversial derby in the world between the Rangers Football Club and the Celtic Football Club. To explain quickly the level of hatred between both sides, we have to go back into history. [...]