Global recruitment specialist Hays has signed a three-year extension to its global partnership with English Premier League football club Manchester City.
Hays first partnered with City in July 2013 through a deal that covered the 2013-14 to 2015-16 seasons. The new agreement will run through to the end of the 2018-19 campaign. Financial terms of the renewal were not disclosed.
Hays will remain the club’s official recruitment partner and will continue to receive advertising exposure through pitchside LED boards at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium. Its branding will also appear on big screens when the team line-ups are announced pre-match.
In addition, the company will work with the club to develop new digital and social media content, while employee engagement initiatives will be launched across Hays’ network of offices worldwide.
From the commencement of their relationship, Hays has supported Manchester City’s recruitment process across its legal, finance, human resources, commercial, marketing and communications teams based in Manchester, London, Asia and the US.
“We have relied on Hays to help us build our organisation,” Tom Glick, commercial and operating officer at City Football Group, Manchester City’s parent company, said. “We are more than a squad of players and an academy; we have a whole professional set-up, which Hays has helped us to find great people for.”
In 2015, Hays extended its relationship with Manchester City to its sister club in New York, New York City FC, which has just kicked off its second season in Major League Soccer.
Sholto Douglas-Home, chief marketing officer of Hays, said: “Our partnership with Manchester City has been transformational in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We were so confident in the progress that we’ve made to date that we signed the renewal before the third year of our original relationship finished. The world of work and the world of sport have more synergies than people realise and we have been able to showcase those similarities across our digital assets.”