Riyadh Air has expanded its sponsorship agreement with Atlético Madrid to include the naming rights to the team’s 70,000-capacity Metropolitano Stadium.
The Saudi brand, which has yet to embark on a commercial flight, has served as the club’s front-of-shirt sponsor since the start of last season, agreeing a four-year deal that was scheduled to run until the end of the 2026-27 campaign. The club has now added to this with a nine-year deal to re-name the stadium as the ‘Riyadh Air Metropolitano’, starting with the club’s next home match on October 20 against Leganés.
The opportunity to sponsor the stadium has come about after Spanish property developer Civitas Pacensis decided to exit its venue-naming agreement. The ground has been known as the ‘Civitas Metropolitano’ since July 2022 when the LaLiga side announced a ten-year deal with the firm. The company replaced Chinese conglomerate Wanda, which held the rights between 2017-18 and 2021-22 before retreating from its investments in football.
Spanish publication El Independiente reported in August that representatives from Civitas had met with figures from the club and that a termination was likely to be announced in August. The same outlet quoted sources as saying the developer would continue to sponsor the club in some capacity and suggested it had terminated the contract to allow the club to accept a more lucrative sponsorship offer for the venue.
ANALYSIS: Riyadh Air starts low on rights fee escalator for Atlético shirt deal
Riyadh Air has yet to embark on its first commercial flight and is wholly funded by the country’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Despite this fact, the brand has been linked with several high-profile sponsorship opportunities, including Chelsea FC’s men’s and women’s team front-of-shirt rights.
The London club began this season without a shirt sponsor, the second successive campaign it has done so, and the expansion of the deal with Madrid team appears to reduce the chances of an agreement between the two parties.
SportBusiness understands Riyadh Air also considered a joint proposal to become a global sponsor of the Uefa Champions League, together with tourism body Visit Saudi, from 2024-25 to 2026-27, but the opportunity was ultimately felt to have come too soon for the new brand. As exclusively reported by SportBusiness, Uefa and its exclusively sponsorship sales agency for men’s club competitions, went on to agree an unprecedented two-cycle deal with regional rival Qatar Airways, effectively locking competitors out of the category until 2030.
The ‘digitally-led’ Riyadh Air was officially launched in March 2023 and expects to make its first flight in 2025, with plans to connect the country’s capital Riyadh to more than 100 destinations by 2030. It plans to focus on the niche market for flights to and from the kingdom rather than compete with the global hubs created by other Gulf-based carriers, Emirates and Qatar Airways, and to a lesser extent, Etihad.
In earlier comments reported by the CNN news network, Tony Douglas, chief executive of Riyadh Air, said that the move to sponsor the Spanish club two years ahead of the launch flight was because the airline was intent on creating a global brand.
In the earlier interview, Douglas claimed that Atlético’s matches against Real and Barcelona draw global audiences of one billion people, allowing the airline to connect “with a global populace that follows sport.”
He cited the club’s qualification for the Champions League in every season for the last decade as a further reason to sponsor. Douglas said that the common denominator between the two organisations would be their digital audiences.
“We will be the world’s first true digital native as an airline and Atletico has one of the biggest digital followships [sic] in world soccer,” he said.