The Pyramid partners with Cheltenham Town

What the partnership is

The agreement runs for two years and covers two pieces of inventory at Whaddon Road: a static pitchside board carrying The Pyramid masthead, the website address and QR codes at either end, and the LED perimeter system, which runs the masthead and the line Football finance all the way down in sequence through the match.

Both went live on Saturday 10 October for Cheltenham Town's League Two fixture against Salford City.

Cheltenham are in their third consecutive season in League Two and their 140th as a football club. Founded in 1887 and known as the Robins, they were Gloucestershire's first Football League club, and have spent most of the past quarter-century moving between the bottom two divisions of the EFL, including a decade in League One. Steve Cotterill, who managed the club to its first promotion into the Football League, is back for a further spell and kept them up last season. David Bloxham is chairman. Whaddon Road holds 7,066.

Why Cheltenham

We started buying pitchside advertising in August, at Boreham Wood in the National League and Corinthian-Casuals at tier nine. Peterborough United followed in September at tier three, and Hanwell Town at tier seven in October. Cheltenham is the fifth, and it closes the gap between the third tier and the fifth.

That matters more than the number. Our partnerships now run consecutively from League One to the National League, which means we have advertising at three adjacent levels of the same ladder for the first time. The ambition is a partner club at every tier from two to ten, and this is the first stretch where that is actually joined up.

League Two is a useful place to be for reasons beyond the gap it fills. It is the last division inside the Football League and the point at which the financial cushion available higher up has run out for most clubs. The sums are small enough that a single bad season is a genuine problem and large enough that clubs are full-time businesses with real payrolls. Much of what we write about — clubs that cannot pay wages, grounds that belong to councils, owners who stop funding — happens at or around this level.

There is also the reason we gave when we started buying. We have spent a good deal of this year writing about what football sponsorship and advertising are actually worth, including asking two clubs in the same division what they charged for front-of-shirt sponsorship and receiving quotes of £50,000 and £15,000. Having written about the market, it seemed reasonable to become a buyer as well as an observer, and to find out what it looks like from the other side of the transaction.

We set out what we learned from the first deals in Is Football Sponsorship Actually Worth It?. Cheltenham gives us a fourth tier to measure, and a direct comparison with Peterborough one division above.

On independence

The Pyramid's editorial coverage includes Cheltenham Town in exactly the same way as any other club within our coverage: from the filed accounts, corporate record and public statements, without favour.

A commercial relationship with a club we write about creates an obvious question, and the answer is the one we have applied at Boreham Wood since August. The partnership has no bearing on what we publish. Nothing about it gives Cheltenham any say over our coverage of the club, League Two or anything else.

Whenever we write about Cheltenham Town, the piece will state plainly that The Pyramid is a commercial partner of the club, so readers can take that relationship into account for themselves.

That is the same standard we would expect of any publication writing about a business with which it has a commercial relationship, and we would rather state it here than have someone else point it out later.

What happens next

The partnership runs for two years at Whaddon Road. The QR codes on the static board lead to The Pyramid newsletter, which remains free.

With five clubs across five tiers, we can start making comparisons that mean something. We now have advertising at tiers three, four, five, seven and nine, and as the season develops we will be able to look at what those different audiences actually deliver rather than assuming that bigger automatically means better. Cheltenham and Peterborough sit one division apart, which makes them the cleanest comparison we have.

Our thanks to everyone at Cheltenham Town for making it happen, and to the supporters who have already found us through the boards.

If you are one of them, welcome — the accounts are more interesting than you might think.