In addition to the Mooca team, another South American club had a uniform without a sponsor at the option of the sponsor itself.
Theoretically, it was the German Eintracht Braunschweig, champion of the 1966-67 Bundesliga, the first club in world football to display a sponsor on its uniform. In 1973, Jagermeister and Eintracht signed a partnership that was unprecedented in football at the time: printing the drink brand on the club’s shirt.
The problem, however, was that the German Football Federation did not allow this practice; it was only possible to place the brand of the sporting equipment on the uniforms, in addition to the shield.
To circumvent the federation’s rules, in January of that year, the club and brand simply exchanged the team’s badge for the Jagermeister symbol. But it didn’t work: football’s highest governing body claimed that such an action would be an affront to the club’s own history.
But in a vote among members, within a terrible financial context that the club was going through, the change of the shield was approved. At the time, the team received 100,000 German marks per year.
In Brazil, sponsorships began to appear on team shirts in the early 1980s, years after the movement had intensified in other centers, such as Europe.
First, the National Sports Council authorized advertising only on the back of the uniforms, above the numbers. In 1983, sponsorship on the front was released.
The first club in the country to have advertising was the Democrat of Sete Lagoas, from Minas Gerais, which featured the brand of the Agrimisa bank and the sports team Equipe for the value of Cr$500 thousand, a value that would not reach R$20 thousand today.
Currently, space on a football team’s shirt is expensive. Corinthians, for example, signed a deal with the betting site VaideBet, which will invest R$370 million over the next three years. But last Tuesday (27) a different action, designed and developed by DM9, caught attention.
To talk about the brand experience for clothes washers, Consul ‘cleaned’ all sponsors of the shirt that celebrates the centenary of Juventus, one of the most traditional clubs in São Paulo.
In the match for the Campeonato Paulista, the team entered the field with a clean shirt, without the logo of any sponsor, not even Consul. However, another club in Latin America had the same idea.
In 2010, Racing, from Argentina, sold the main share of its sponsorship to Banco Hipotecario Nacional, which chose not to display its brand on the team’s uniforms. At the time, the justification used by the financial institution was to return the twisted shirt.
Highlight for PR
Sports marketing specialist and CEO of Heatmap, Ren Salviano said that the visibility of uniforms on TV, social media and other means shows the strength of this type of sponsorship, which brings recognition to the brand.
“We have to see how the action unfolds to understand the spontaneous media generated and calculate all these benefits in contrast to the brand’s lack of visibility,” he said.
Still according to him, actions like this, involving Consul and Juventus, must be measured before any comment.
“We need to take into account the exposure channel that the brand is failing to expose and how much is lost as a result. I don’t even need a robust media report to understand that there is a loss of exposure that (always) must be considered but for a I only play the immense PR generated that makes it all worth it.”
