Advertising On Football Shirts Is Increasingly Expensive

Last year, the top 20 football teams in Britain gained 330 million euros in shirt sponsorship deals – a third up from the previous year.

This increase isn’t just true of Britain – shirt sponsorship fees earned by clubs in Europe’s top six divisions has nearly doubled since 2010, to 830 million euros. Economics applicants should consider why this is – and The Economist suggests that it could be due to changes in traditional media we have seen in the past decade.

While some would argue that ‘water-cooler TV’ (the idea that large numbers of a population all watch the same programmes at the same time) is still possible on streaming platforms like Netflix, the fragmentation of services has made this phenomenon less common. The exception is sports, where live broadcasts on television are still the main way people consume sports media. As such, shirt advertising is still a lucrative means of advertising on TV as there is more of a guarantee that it will be seen by viewers.

PPE applicants should consider how advertising expenditure of major corporations varies with trends in technology which, as proven by this pattern, are frequently strongly correlated.