3 Key Football Sponsorship Trends in 2021 | Sports Marketing Agency

SportQuake CEO Matt House looks back on 2021, highlighting three key trends in football sponsorship this year:

As we approach the end of 2021 and find ourselves working through the latest phase of the Covid pandemic, I have been reflecting on the year and wanted to highlight 3 key trends and reasons to be cheerful about the health of football sponsorship for 2022.

1) Football’s ongoing popularity and relevance

As is well reported and no doubt being experienced first-hand by readers, we are living through a period of massive, rapid change. Within this, whilst delivery, consumption and investment in football is also changing, it’s notable that football’s popularity and relevance is at an all-time high (even growing). This is highlighted by many measures but very neatly demonstrated in our friends at Google’s latest research, which shows the three most-searched Google terms in 2021 were ‘Euros’, ‘Premier League’ and ‘Christian Eriksen’.

2) Changing sponsor investment profile

As the world’s most popular sport, football sponsorship reflects wider global macro-economics, so it’s no surprise based on the massive consumption changes we are seeing that digital-first or ‘new economy’ businesses now represent 40% of all global football sponsorship spend.

These high-growth companies are attracted to football sponsorship due to it’s proven platform for brand building, providing rapid brand awareness for companies to present themselves consistently to attractive demographics in key markets, across all key media channels, quickly and at scale.

It is also home to the world’s most recognised teams and players. Aligning with these globally respected organisations and athletes drives trust and credibility with all key stakeholders, from transacting customers to regulators, while also presenting the opportunity to create highly engaging content marketing and experiences to acquire and retain users.

Within this, crypto brands have announced themselves loudly on the scene in 2021, investing a huge $366m in global sports sponsorship (a 5X year-on-year increase). Led by Crypto.com and FTX, 50+ crypto brands are now spending across various sports and inventory, including football shirt sponsorship and stadium naming rights, as well as smaller entry level partnerships.

3) Web 3 and the Metaverse

In October, the metaverse became a topic of mainstream discussion as Facebook was rebranded Meta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing plans for the tech giant to transition to a metaverse-focused company over the coming years.

Whilst talk of the metaverse has so far been conceptual, it’s clear that sport generally (and football specifically) will play a major role in driving mass consumer adoption and real-world usage of new technologies and applications, as has been the case with sport / football’s centrality at the heart of the social media and pay TV phenomenons.

One of the big things here will be whether sports teams and organisations can take the learnings from their social media experience and take greater control of their destiny to build communities on their own, or in a way that makes them less reliant on big tech, ensuring a greater share of revenue/ data economics, than is currently the case.

What other trends did you see in 2021 and what do you predict will happen in 2022?

Looking to learn more about Premier League sponsorship opportunities in your brand sector? Get in touch with the SportQuake team.