Campeonato Brasileiro Série A club Flamengo has signed a new front-of-shorts partnership with Brazilian health insurance firm Benevix.
Under the deal, Benevix will have branding on the front-left of the Flamengo shorts, just above the logo of technical sponsor adidas.
The deal will run until the end of the 2019 season, and will take Flamengo’s total number of partners to 19, according to a club statement.
Benevix is the first Flamengo sponsor to start its partnership with a shorts branding asset at the club, without a pre-existing deal at some other partnership level.
The Brazilian football season began in late April, but Flamengo has announced a continuous stream of new partnerships since the Série A got underway.
Last month, Flamengo announced a one-season sleeve partnership with Brazilian ridesharing app Buser, and a one-season Official Partner deal with online sportsbook and casino brand Sportsbet.io.
Sportsbet.io’s investment in Flamengo is one of the most prominent gambling partnerships signed in Brazil since the country legalised sports betting in December last year.
SportBusiness Sponsorship understands that Sportsbet.io has been investing heavily in sponsorship going into the 2019-20 season, including a record front-of-shirt deal with Premier League club Watford.
Read this: Watford, West Ham, Burnley, Bournemouth see strong uptick in shirt inventory
At the beginning of this season, Flamengo ended a five-year front-of-shirt deal with Brazilian state bank Caixa Econômica Federal, after newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro introduced new legislation to force the bank out of sports sponsorship.
Last season, Caixa paid R$25m ($6.3m/€5.6m) for the front-of-shirt rights at Flamengo – its biggest single partnership spend in 2018 – but this season, Flamengo was able to secure less than half of that amount in the first year of a two-season deal with digital bank brand BS2.
Flamengo is Brazil’s strongest sponsorship platform and most popular club by number of supporters, with a fanbase of about 37.5 million, according to Brazilian market research firm Datafolha.
Read this: Brazilian club football sponsorship in freefall after Caixa exit