Is Football Sponsorship Actually Worth It?

This month, The Pyramid agreed pitch-side sponsorship with Boreham Wood and Corinthian-Casuals. Boreham Wood announced The Pyramid Finance as a new commercial partner on 19 August. The club describes us as an independent football-finance publication specialising in club finances, ownership, investment and business developments across the pyramid.

Neither deal is remotely comparable with the sums being discussed at the top of English football. Chelsea are reportedly holding out for something around £50 million for the front of their shirt. Tottenham's front-of-shirt rights have been independently estimated at £29.8 million. At the other end of our own research, we've been quoted figures measured in tens of thousands rather than tens of millions.

But having just become football sponsors ourselves, there is a rather obvious question worth asking.

Does football sponsorship actually work?

What happens further down the pyramid?

In our own recent enquiries, Dulwich Hamlet quoted The Pyramid £50,000 for front-of-shirt sponsorship.

Aveley, who play in the same division, quoted £15,000.

The numbers are fascinating from the clubs' perspective. But there's another side to the transaction.

What does the sponsor actually get?

Football clubs are very good at explaining the audience a brand can reach. That's understandable — they're selling the inventory.

The harder question for whoever writes the cheque is whether any of that attention ultimately turns into customers.

Having just written some cheques ourselves, we thought we'd look.

What exactly did we buy?

At its simplest, a pitch-side board buys visibility.

People attending a match see it. Photographers may capture it. It can appear behind players in highlights, club videos and social-media posts. Depending on the level and the fixture, television cameras may repeatedly put it in front of an audience far larger than the one inside the ground.

But that's only the obvious part.

The Pyramid isn't a consumer drinks company trying to sell another bottle of beer.

We're building a football-finance publication and intelligence platform. Our potential audience includes club owners, directors, executives, investors, sponsors and supporters interested in the business of football.

So being physically present inside football grounds has a certain logic.

That distinction turns out to matter. Because the evidence suggests sponsorship works rather differently from simply buying advertising space.

Football fans appear unusually receptive to sponsors

There is reasonably strong evidence that sport can transfer some of the goodwill supporters feel towards a team to the companies associated with it.

Nielsen's 2025 Global Sports Report found that 67% of football fans globally find sponsoring brands more appealing, compared with 54% of the general population.

Football also accounts for 41% of sports sponsorships globally.

That's a powerful commercial characteristic.

Ordinary advertising interrupts something you're interested in. Sports sponsorship attaches itself to it. And supporters don't necessarily treat the two in the same way.

Nielsen's Fan Insights data found that 59% of football fans would choose a sponsor's product over a competitor's if price and quality were the same, compared with 45% of the general population.

A further 56% actively inform themselves about brands involved in sports sponsorship.

That doesn't mean putting your logo beside a pitch automatically creates customers. But it does suggest football provides something advertisers spend enormous amounts trying to manufacture: receptivity.

Does that actually change what people buy?

This is the much harder question.

Brand awareness is useful. Purchase intent is better. Sales are better still.

Nielsen analysed 100 sponsorships across seven markets and 20 industries during 2020 and 2021. The sponsorships produced an average 10% increase in purchase intent among the exposed fanbase.

Nielsen also found sponsorship performed particularly strongly for consumer trust, behind only personal recommendations and branded websites in its Trust in Advertising Study.

That's meaningful evidence. But purchase intent still isn't a sale.

The supporter who watches twice a season and barely notices the advertising boards isn't commercially equivalent to the supporter who attends every week, follows the club on every platform and spends the rest of Saturday discussing it. The more important the club is to the supporter, the more valuable the association can become.

But there's an important word in all of this: can.

A logo isn't an ROI

This is where football's commercial pitch becomes less comfortable.

Exposure isn't revenue. Purchase intention isn't revenue either. And sponsorship doesn't benefit every business equally.

Imagine two companies paying exactly the same amount for exactly the same football sponsorship.

One sells a product that supporters understand, can easily buy and already have some need for. The other sells something irrelevant to almost everyone watching.

They have purchased the same number of eyeballs. They haven't purchased the same commercial opportunity.

And this is why simply comparing sponsorship prices tells us surprisingly little about whether they're good value.

That's why fit matters

This brings us back to The Pyramid.

If we advertised beside a motorway, millions of people might drive past the logo. Most wouldn't care.

A board inside a football ground may be seen by dramatically fewer people, but almost every person seeing it has already passed one important qualification: they're interested in football.

At Boreham Wood, that audience becomes more interesting again. The club is operating in the National League, precisely the part of English football The Pyramid spends much of its time covering: club finances, ownership, investment, regulation and the economics below the Premier League.

Corinthian-Casuals provides a different audience and takes us further down the non-league pyramid. The absolute reach is smaller. The relevance is potentially very high.

For a specialist business, 1,000 relevant impressions can conceivably be worth more than 100,000 irrelevant ones. That's why sponsorship can't sensibly be valued on audience size alone.

The £15,000 question

Our recent front-of-shirt research makes this particularly interesting.

Aveley quoted The Pyramid £15,000. Dulwich Hamlet quoted £50,000. Same division.

Our first article asked why the club-side valuation differs by more than threefold. But turn the question around.

What would a sponsor have to achieve to justify spending £15,000?

Suppose a local business makes £500 of gross profit from an average new customer. It needs 30 incremental customers to recover a £15,000 rights fee. At £50,000, it needs 100. A business generating £5,000 of lifetime gross profit from each acquired customer needs three and ten respectively.

Now consider a £9 million Premier League sponsorship. At £500 of gross profit per incremental customer, a sponsor needs 18,000 new customers merely to recover the rights fee. And that's before activation costs.

This isn't a valuation model. Customer economics differ enormously, and sponsorship can produce long-term brand benefits that can't sensibly be attributed to an immediate sale.

But it demonstrates why asking whether £15,000 is "cheap" and £9 million is "expensive" misses the point. The answer depends on who is buying it.

The best sponsorship might be nowhere near the Premier League

This creates an intriguing possibility.

The most valuable sponsorship assets are clearly concentrated at the top of football. The best returns may not be.

A Premier League shirt gives a brand enormous international distribution. But the sponsor pays accordingly.

At lower levels, audiences collapse — but so do rights fees. And something else potentially improves: specificity.

A local property company doesn't need somebody in Singapore to see its logo. A regional accountancy firm doesn't need 500 million global impressions. A football-finance business doesn't necessarily need somebody who doesn't care about football.

For those companies, a smaller club can offer a concentrated audience at a price where relatively few new commercial relationships are required to justify the investment. That's an entirely different economic proposition.

There's also the problem of attribution

Even when sponsorship works, proving it can be difficult.

Someone sees a brand on a shirt for three years. Six months later, they search for that type of product. They recognise the name. They buy.

Which marketing channel gets the credit?

Google may claim the conversion because that's where the final click happened. The football sponsorship may have created the familiarity that caused the customer to click that company rather than its competitor.

That's one reason sponsorship measurement increasingly extends beyond simply counting how many times a logo appeared on television.

Nielsen's own research makes the same distinction. Its analysis looks beyond exposure towards measures such as awareness, consideration and purchase intent, and says its broader experience base finds that, on average, a one-point increase in brand metrics such as awareness and consideration corresponds with a 1% increase in sales.

If exposure alone demonstrated value, nobody would need such complicated measurement.

The sponsors nobody forgets

There is another form of return that's even harder to put into a spreadsheet.

Some football sponsorships become part of the club's identity. Sharp and Manchester United. JVC and Arsenal. Carlsberg and Liverpool. Holsten and Tottenham.

Those companies haven't occupied those shirts for years — in some cases decades — yet supporters of the right age can still picture the logo alongside the kit. Very few conventional advertising campaigns achieve that kind of memory.

The reason is partly repetition. But it's also emotional context. People remember the shirt their club won something in. They remember the players wearing it. They remember owning the replica themselves.

The sponsor becomes embedded in the memory. That's difficult to value. It is also very real.

So was our sponsorship worth it?

Ask us again at the end of the season.

That's really the point.

The Pyramid's boards at Boreham Wood and Corinthian-Casuals will generate visibility. What we don't yet know is whether enough of that visibility will matter.

We'll be able to watch website traffic, direct searches, newsletter registrations, commercial enquiries and eventually platform registrations. We can ask new users where they heard about us.

And because we're covering football sponsorship anyway, there's an opportunity to do something slightly unusual. We can publish what happens. Not commercially sensitive details of our agreements, but whether sponsorship actually moves the metrics a small football business cares about.

Did direct traffic increase? Did more people search for The Pyramid? Did subscriptions rise around televised or well-covered fixtures? Did anyone actually tell us they discovered the publication from a board at a football ground?

That turns our sponsorship into a small live experiment. And perhaps gives us a better answer to the question than another sponsorship-industry presentation ever could.

The Pyramid View

Does football sponsorship work? That's probably the wrong question.

The evidence suggests sports sponsorship can increase brand appeal, purchase intent and consumer trust. Football supporters appear particularly receptive: Nielsen finds 67% consider sponsoring brands more appealing, 59% would favour the sponsor at equal price and quality, and 56% actively seek information about sponsoring brands.

But none of those figures tells a company whether it should spend £15,000, £50,000, £9 million or £50 million putting its name on football.

The real question is whether a particular sponsorship works for a particular company at a particular price.

Chelsea can reportedly ask around £50 million because it offers global distribution few sporting properties can replicate. Dulwich Hamlet can ask £50,000. Aveley can ask £15,000. Boreham Wood and Corinthian-Casuals sell something different again.

The audience shrinks as you descend the pyramid. So does the price. But the commercial relevance of every person looking at the board doesn't necessarily shrink with it. For the right business, it may increase.

That's why the best sponsorship deal in English football isn't necessarily the one with the biggest audience. It might be the one where the fewest of those eyeballs are wasted.

We'll find out whether ours are.