Manchester United will host Liverpool a week from Sunday in a match-up of two arch-rivals that sit currently far apart in the table. Liverpool lead the league while United are 12th, but the two sides are still on equal footing when it comes to marketing and corporate partnerships.
While the course of their two seasons has been diametrically opposed thus far, we’ve seen reports circulate around both clubs in regards to potential record breaking kit deals this fall. For Liverpool, it’s the sportswear producer partnership, as Nike are reportedly prepared to out-bid current partner New Balance.
The amount would supposedly set a new record for an English club. With United, it’s the potential shirt sponsor, which would eclipse any previous contract in world history.
ESPN FC reports today: “that a number of major brands have expressed an interest in becoming United’s principal shirt sponsor and the club are confident of negotiating a deal that would exceed GM’s £450m seven-year agreement despite a poor start to the season.”
This despite United’s bad start to the season, which finds them closer to the drop zone than the top four. United haven’t won a road game since last March, and the Ole Gunnar Solskjaer era is off to a rough start, but the club still claims to have more than one billion supporters worldwide.
With a report in Spain today claiming that Chevrolet would be willing to fund most of an aggressive bid to acquire Neymar, all of this seems to make more sense. It certainly sounds like General Motors is worried about losing this partnership when it expires.
Although the results on the pitch haven’t been there since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, the club continues to consistently rank among the top three most powerful football brands and richest clubs, next to Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
The current shirt sponsor is Chevrolet, with the GM partnership, finalized in 2014, set to come to an end in 2021. It will be interesting to see if Chevy matches or even exceeds the offers MUFC receives from other brands. It is of course news items like these that keeps CEO Ed Woodward within the good graces of the Glazer family ownership.
Woodward’s a stellar business man, but his player roster personnel decisions have been nothing short of disastrous. Maybe this time the added revenue will get put into actually constructing a more competitive team?
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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