With the changing face of football at the top level over the past two decades having seen multi-national, blue chip companies dominate the advertising space, for smaller businesses it has become near impossible to find affordable and impactful sponsorship deals with Premier League clubs.
With the traditional sight of hundreds of different fixed advertising hoardings around the stadium, which had global visibility through the presence of the Premier League in homes around the world due to its broadcast reach, having been replaced by LED hoardings which can be more targeted and valuable to clubs, smaller businesses have largely been squeezed out at the top level.
With the opportunities for more local businesses squeezed in more recent years, with the costs to get significant commercial visibility at Premier League level cost prohibitive for many SMEs, one of Liverpool’s commercial partnerships has sought to bridge that gap.
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In February last year Liverpool inked a multi-year deal with VistaPrint for the firm to become the Reds’ official small business design and marketing partner.
As part of the deal, Liverpool and VistaPrint, who also have a similar partnership with the Boston Celtics NBA team, launched the ‘Small Business of the Match’ initiative, where local businesses can get the major bluechip treatment at selected home games to raise their profile. Players would also get involved with marketing, whether that be Trent Alexander-Arnold giving a fade at a Iddy’s Barbershop or Kostas Tsimikas helping at Dog One Groomers as part of the ‘work experience’ online content that was created to promote the partnership.
Claire Reynolds, VistaPrint’s marketing director for Northern Europe, told the ECHO: “VistaPrint’s mission is to be the marketing and design partner for small businesses, and within that one of our guiding purposes is about shining a spotlight on small businesses.
“The partnership with Liverpool has given us a really fantastic platform to do it because it is a massive club with a global reach. Our focus is very much about using that platform and assets to showcase small businesses. It has been very well received.
“One of the things that we do is Small Business of the Match, where we take a small business and give them a really nice matchday experience at the game and in the Legends Lounge. Most impactful for them is that they have their business advertised on the LED pitch side advertising which has massive reach at the match and on TV and social media. That has a real tangible impact for those businesses.
“Liverpool is a very authentic club and has those deep connections to the community.”
For Liverpool, delivering consistently improving commercial revenues is core to the club’s business strategy of sustainable growth that underpins success. For the most recent financial accounts for 2021/22, where the VistaPrint deal was included in the figures, commercial revenue rose by £29m year on year to a figure of £247m for the year ending May 2022.
But while the remit is to keep growing commercial revenues year on year, through both sponsorship retention and the acquisition of new partners, for a club like Liverpool it is important to have partnerships that align with the ethos of the club as well as delivering value for both club and partner.
“This is the first time we’ve done a partnership like this with someone where there are essentially pass-through rights to allow local businesses to use the rights that we provide to Vista,” explained Liverpool commercial director Ben Latty.
“For us it felt like the right deal as we are a club rooted in its local community and giving back to local communities through a partnership felt like the right thing to do and we have been delighted with the response from local businesses and fans.
“Where we are trying to head to is to have one of the most or the most impactful partnerships platforms in sports and entertainment, that is what we want to get to. To do that we have to partner with industry leading brands, leaders within their field and that is really the crux of it for us.
“More and more you will be seeing our partners align with the Red Way as well, giving back to communities near and far.
“Partnerships are key to our business model. We always say that we have a sustainable business model. We have to be delivering for businesses like Vista, we know that they are going to be changing their goals and KPIs and we have to be fluid and flexible in our approach to how we work with them.
“We have to continue to push the boundaries.”
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