By Tony Attwood
Eventually, there is an end, simply because things can’t go on growing forever. But the funny thing about endings is that few people see them coming, but once they have come, everyone wonders why no one saw it coming.
Manchester City and Puma are gambling on the notion that the club will keep growing, state sponsorship will continue to be accepted, that the 115 claims against the club will either never be settled or will be settled in the club’s favour, and that Puma, the third largest sportswear maker in the world will continue to grow at an extraordinary pace, not least through exposure via Man C’s shirts.
And maybe they are right. Or maybe ManC will be found guilty in most of those 115 cases, but their punishment will be a fine that they can easily pay. Or maybe everyone will simply forget about the 115 and one day the League will quietly admit that it was “unable to reach a conclusion based on the evidence presented” which would be a polite way of saying that the club threatened to sue the League out of existence and the League gave in.
Or maybe a growing number of people will say, “I’m not having anything that is associated with Etihad Airways, PUMA, OKX , Asahi, Experience Abu Dhabi, and everyone else sponsoring Manchester C.
Who knows? Meanwhile, as the Telegraph says, “Manchester City have agreed a new kit deal with Puma which could eventually be worth £1 billion,” which must provide them with some security should the unthinkable happen and Manchester City get a points fine so big it takes them down several divisions.
In discussing the Manchester C / Puma deal, there is talk of a “decade of growth at City” – although little discussion of what that means.
In 2023/24 ManC had a revenue of £715m and a profit of £73.8m. In the same period, Arsenal also had a record revenue of £616.6m but made a loss of £17.7m. Although losses can never be good, at least it was an improvement on the loss of £52.1m the year before.
Arsenal’s loss is worrying, and even more so since Chelsea reported a profit of £128m for that same tax year, which it achieved by selling players, and selling the women’s team to another company that the same people owned.
In fact, that last ploy of selling part of the Chelsea operation to another company owned by the same people who owned Chelsea has been such a success (given that the League just let it happen) that it seems that several other clubs are looking at the idea as a way of covering their next loss.
But tucked away in all this is Puma, which seems to be compliant to ManC’s needs and who basically need the club to continue as now (which presumably means not suffering from any nasty findings against them in any court or tribunal). But maybe the deal has a side clause which ensures that Puma is compensated by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan if they come out worse in the still-running 115 charges case.
For Manchester City there are no financial gambles because of their ownership but for Puma this does look like a pretty big gamble. Nike and Adidas have gone a different way having deals with lots of different clubs. Arsenal are with Adidas and will be until 2030.
The campaign group Gunners for Peace and are calling on Arsenal not to renew its deal with Visit Rwanda as the partnership does not fit the club’s “values and standards”.
The group has distributed armbands to cover up the Visit Rwanda logo on kits, and displayed a banner saying Drop Visit Rwanda’ and have posted the occasional “Visit Tottenham” posters to mark the protest. One Football predicted that the “Visit Rwanda” campaign could end last season, but it seems not.
So Puma are staying with Manchester City and Arsenal with Rwanda, leaving the question: does it all work? The answer has to be to a degree, but no one is ever quite sure how much, nor of course, how much the knock-back works, in terms of fans of other teams deliberately avoiding the products or services sponsoring a rival. And of course, in the case of Manchester City, if the cases against them ever do reach a conclusion and the club loses in some way, what impact would that have on the club’s sponsors?
Normally, we would probably say the impact is little – I’m going to be an Arsenal fan no matter what, but the ManC case takes us into all sorts of unknown territory, and although of course, the hard-core support of ManC will always be there, some of the sponsorship income might slip away.
Perhaps overall, the biggest issue in football is the “not necessarily” clause. Because something worked once, is not a guarantee that it will work again, and go on working. And what we do know is that not everything can grow, all the time.
I’d like all Arsenal’s sponsors to be ethical, but that desire seems a long way off.
I find one of the most disturbing things about sponsorship is the gambling industry. The gambling advertisements are everywhere particularly on television and right at the time when children are there to see them. Inevitably this will cause children to see this as normal and many will gamble, some with caution and a sense of fun but many will spend more than they should.
Whilst one can consider the ethical considerations of the Rwanda scheme the practical outcome is infintesimal.