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Last round for beer and football?

Posted in Marketing, Oliver Milman May 23rd, 2007 by Oliver Milman

Football, with its pre-game pints and tabloid tales of excess, has long been associated with alcohol – but potential new rules banning shirt sponsorship by drinks brands could cause a scramble for the phones within many teams’ marketing departments.

The Portman Group, the body that regulates drinks marketing, is pondering proposals on whether to ban all sports sponsorship by alcohol brands. While other sports, such as tennis’ Stella Artois tournament, will be hit, the effects on football could be dramatic.

Many top teams have beer shirt sponsors, most notably Liverpool, backed by Carlsberg since 1992. Other sides have cushy off-pitch deals involving advertising hoardings in return for corporate hospitality for executives more normally found cheering on rugby teams.

Liverpool are currently deciding whether to renew the Carlsberg deal and will be waiting to see the new rules with interest. The club, which contested its second Champion League final in three years this week, is looking to become a more global brand under its new American owners and may look for something without such an Anglo-Danish feel.

Chelsea and Manchester United, who contested a yawn-inducing FA Cup final on Saturday, have at least got their sponsorship houses in order, having global brands Samsung and AIG emblazoned across their players’ chests.

For its part, the drinks industry will have been expecting the worse for some years, with bans creeping in across Europe. English football teams playing in countries such as France have, for some years, had to remove alcohol sponsorship from shirts. The Welsh rugby team even had to transform the word ‘Brains’, of its brewery sponsor, to ‘Brawn’ when crossing the Channel.

While Liverpool, and Carling-backed Celtic, will have the luxury of choosing a similarly big name to sponsor them, smaller teams may not have quite that luxury. Long-running deals may have to be scrapped or significantly scaled down.

Just as tobacco firms were inexorably linked to Formula 1 racing until the recent ban, will football clubs find it takes years to escape from the whiff of alcohol?