AMERICAN SPORTSWEAR firm Warrior Sports has agreed a Premier League record £150m, six-year kit deal with Liverpool FC, starting this summer, until 2018.
Liverpool will be guaranteed £25m per year; more than the league's previous record £23.5m per year deal Manchester United struck with Nike in 2002.
Under that deal, which is currently being renegotiated, Nike agreed to pay £302.9m over 13 years in an agreement which also saw Nike take control of United's global licensing and retail operations.
The Warrior contract, which replaces the six-year, £12m per year adidas deal, has no such requirement. Indeed, unlike the present agreement with adidas, Liverpool will gain full control over its non-branded, general retail products over the period.
As Liverpool managing director, Ian Ayre, explained: “Our business is split in two. We have what you call kit, the branded products, the stuff the players wear and that’s the part of the business that the deal with Warrior covers.
“In our existing deal, there have been some restrictions on that in terms of the other unbranded products we sell. In our new deal, we have complete control of that. We will still work with Warrior, but we will have a much wider opportunity.
“The new deal represents half of what we currently generate [from merchandising], so we still have another opportunity to develop similar kind of revenues and that’s what encouraged us.”
Although some observers have been surprised at the guaranteed £25m per year committed by Warrior to a club that has failed to qualify for the UEFA Champions League for the last two seasons, high guarantees are usually a sign that a club can sell a significant amount of shirts (or that the cost shirt price from the manufacturer is high).
According to a report in The Guardian newspaper, Liverpool's replica shirt sales are nearly 900,000 a year, ranking the club fourth in the world for replica kit behind Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Despite the high price for entry into the Premier League, therefore, the Warrior Sports guarantee could be partly recouped by the amount of money the club pays the Michigan-based manufacturer for the shirts to sell-on.
Certainly, the incumbent, adidas, felt it could not justify paying more than double its current fee.
Adidas chief executive Herbert Hainer said: "We thought that what Liverpool were asking and what they were delivering was not in the right balance."