The English Premier League has completed its central portfolio of seven Official Partners with the signature of Coca-Cola as the Official Soft Drink Partner in a three-and-a-half-year partnership, starting in January 2019.
The global deal, thought to be worth £10m (€11.1m/$13.2m) per year, takes the league’s sponsorship revenue to around £93m for 2018-19, up from £83m the previous year, and up by 24 per cent from the £75m accrued in the final year of the title sponsorship by the banking group Barclays in 2015-16.
The deal will be activated across multiple brands within the group portfolio, showcasing a range of drinks including sparkling soft drinks, water and fruit-based drinks, with low and no-sugar options.
Will Brass, head of sales and marketing at the Premier League, told Sports Sponsorship Insider that the deal with Coca-Cola will be activated in the domestic UK market but is also likely to be leveraged internationally.
Jon Woods, general manager of Coca-Cola Great Britain and Ireland also has responsibility for the Nordics, and it is anticipated that there will be rollout of the partnership in that region.
Coca-Cola Great Britain is also thought to be in the process of engaging with the group’s international markets, including divisions in Southeast Asia, China and the Middle East, to see which want to take advantage of the rights.
Given that Premier League partners do not get branding rights on perimeter broad advertising, it is likely that the branding campaign will be led internationally by on-pack and point of sale promotions.
“Objectively, when you look at our portfolio and you see brands like Coca-Cola, Cadbury and Carling, you can see there will be branding at point of sale, it works within that FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] environment,” Brass said.
“We permit these brands free space in all territories but how they activate is a matter for them. We wouldn’t want to pressure them into doing it. The fact that Coca-Cola is partnering with the Premier League is already a great endorsement and we anticipate the activation will be a further endorsement.”
🎉 ⚽️ 🎉 We are thrilled to announce that from January 2019 we will be an official partner of the @PremierLeague! We can’t wait to bring fans closer to the game, with a drink for every taste and a nationwide Premier League tour. #PL #tastethefeeling pic.twitter.com/0IaJ3Irut5
— Coca-Cola GB (@CocaCola_GB) September 13, 2018
Global Partners
With partners believed to be paying a range between £6m per year from Tag Heuer and £30m per year from Lead Partner EA Sports each, the league and its 20 club stakeholders are thought to be satisfied with the current level of income. The league has chosen not to tinker with the structure by seeking regional sponsors in sectors not covered by the current roster.
“It’s worth remembering that we’re in a cluttered market for sponsorship spending,” Brass said. “It’s important that we don’t add to the clutter but offer something that is distinct.
“Once you go down a regional offering, particularly when talking about an IP-based sell, you risk encroaching on your Global Partners and you risk encroaching on sector exclusivity and disturbing the clarity of what you are selling in the first instance.”
Brass said that the clubs trust the league to go to market and come back with sensible offers.
“You want to find brands that invest at a fair value, but you particularly want to go for brands that sit well alongside the Premier League,” he said.
“Unlike other rights-holders we can’t go into a deal on our own – we must always come back to the club shareholders to ask them to express support through a vote. I think it’s right to say that clubs are very knowledgeable voters and are naturally very experienced in terms of the value of sports marketing.”
Unique structure
The shift from a title partner model (which saw Barclays get around 10 to 12 minutes of LED brand exposure per match) to the current structure (where partners get no LED time but a host of IP and other rights) took place in 2016-17 and was backed up in a new visual identity launched that season. The absence of the title partner also unlocked the LED inventory and shirt sleeve branding for the clubs.
The new structure initially appealed to Premier League partners with strong reasons to activate in the UK, but with further interests in international markets. “In terms of big global partnerships there tend to be two models,” Brass said.
“One of them is to do a deal locally and subsequently get international buy-in. The other one, which we see from time to time, is that the brand makes decisions centrally and globally and then asks the regional markets to support it with individual cash pots.
“The assessment was that the IP might be particularly strong in the domestic market – and, of course, that is true – so generally we saw brands like Molson Coors come in behind the Carling brand [in the UK], but once they had the rights they started to activate them more internationally using multiple brands in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, and even in parts of the United States.”
Clean identity
Brass said that the Premier League can now tell a very positive story of the changes and benefits of the switch from a title sponsor to a partner-led structure.
“We’ve been able to go through that revenue, despite moving away from a title partnership and applying a new strategy. The league and our clubs continue to gain fans around the world so things are continuing on an upward curve for the Premier League as a whole, and it is not unreasonable to expect the partnership programme to reflect that.
“The challenge for us more generally, and this goes to a wider business development point, is to think about how we can clarify and enhance our brand positioning, how we can create better foundations for the clubs to do their work and, importantly, how we can further improve the assets on offer.”
The change in visual identity is key to this improvement. “One of the first people I spoke to when I joined the Premier League was, coincidentally, a friend at Coca-Cola. His point was that they could now put the Premier League logo on the bottle, in theory, whereas they couldn’t before because it had the values of another brand and not clean Premier League values.
“More generally, the visual identity has breathed life into everything we do. Because clearly everything is now in our name and there’s no confusion. We have, for example, been able to supercharge communications around our community programming and run our first brand campaign around Premier League Primary Stars [which provides free curriculum-linked teaching resources for schools]. That kind of work was always going on but can now be an amplified.”