INQUIRER Top Ten IT football sponsorship deals

FOOTBALL AND THE IT industry. One socially important yet, in financial terms, not particularly big business. Britain’s biggest club Man Utd will turn over around ten times less than Computacenter, Britain’s biggest IT company.

That said, Man Utd will make one third more profit (around £60 million) on its £250 million in revenues compared with the £42 million made from shifting mountains of kit.

The IT industry: a vast money-go-round desperately wanting to convince itself that it is socially important. Though mobile phone companies still lurk, with a few exceptions today’s football sponsorship appears to be all about selling beer and online gambling. It wasn’t always so.

1) HP world cup sponsorship 1998
Back in the days when HP went around trying to convince itself and everyone else that it was a consumer brand - it became the official IT supplier to the France 98 Fifa Coupe du Monde. Never afraid of hype, HP claimed its input to the administration of the tournament was on a par with that of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (sponsor, IBM). Think about it, 32 professional teams playing the same game, versus thousands of athletes from 170 countries all living in a village and competing in everything from archery to rowing. Not really the same thing at all.

2) Reseller hoards TV
Back in the day, HP splashed lots of cash at high profile football events. However around that time even it was outdone by one of its resellers. During the rebuilding of Stamford Bridge, Basilica Computers sponsored the huge hoarding behind one of the goals. Back then Chelsea weren't the moneybags club they are now and they conceded plenty of goals guaranteeing Basilica lots of coverage on Match of the Day.

3) ZDS Cup 1985 - 92
The Zenith Data Systems Cup ran for seven seasons until 1992 while English clubs served their ban from European competitions. When the ban lifted, the competition was dropped. The PC maker lasted four more years before being sucked up into Packard Bell/NEC.

4) HP Spurs sponsorship 1995 - 1999
When HP took over the shirt sponsorship at Spurs in an attempt to build its consumer brand profile, one fan in the crowd was heard to ask: “What’s an HP?” When HP blew the whistle on the deal it said had succeeded in its aim of raising “its brand image in the consumer market place.”

5) Sun and Man Utd
An enthusiastic and on-message marketing man once spent an hour gushing about how Sun Microsystems and Man Utd were a natural fit because they were both winners. It was a long hour. Much more understated was the press release at the time the deal was struck: Martyn Lambert, Sun's Director of Marketing and Technologies said: "IT plays a significant role in both sport and business, so our link with Manchester United is a natural one; two market leaders, both committed to development and global success." Convincing. Though it would be more so if Sun was still listed as an official sponsor on the MU web site, which sadly, it’s not. Wonder what changed. Kept that one quiet.

6) HP world cup sponsorship France 1998 Part Deux
HP took hundreds of journalists to Paris for the opening game (Brazil 2 - Scotland 1). A fantastic occasion was only slightly marred when one HP UK executive addressed a bunch of assembled UK hacks. He said that he wanted and expected to see lots of nice things written about HP because, after all, there was no way a bunch of tech journos would have made it to the world
cup without HP. (PR: 1 - own goal - Coverage: 0)

7) Official mobile handset partner
LG is the main sponsor at Fulham. Cross London and LG is the official mobile handset partner at Arsenal. Or is Arsenal the official mobile handset partner to LG? What is an official mobile handset partner?

8) Total Network Solutions
Total Network Solutions FC was a networking reseller posing as a football club posing as a networking reseller. It is now called The New Saints FC Ltd. Nothing to do with Southampton FC and being based in Shropshire they play in the Welsh national league. There’s a story there, or actually 1,479 of them on the club web site: www.saints-alive.co.uk.

9) Aston Villa fails to save AST Computer
Back in the 1990s, AST was the shirt sponsor of Aston Villa. But despite the massive exposure of being spread across midland chests in 2002, the firm said it would abandon the consumer to concentrate on the business market. As for all those shirts, one wag on the Villa web forum noted: "Who needs Villa village, i've got a wardrobe of Mita copiers through AST computers to todays that I need rid of. I reckon i could get round about every bulgarian kid with a villa shirt and still have some spare." Which we think is how they speak in the midlands.

10) Reading and Portsmouth battle it out on paper
Kyocera versus Oki. What a match? One Pompey fan told me that the club’s Oki shirt sponsorship got off to a terrible start because the logo on the replica shirts faded so badly after just a couple of washes that it wasn’t reflecting too well on a printer company. As well as Reading, Kyocera also sponsors Atletico Madrid (Spain), Borussia Monchengladbach (Germany), Atletico Paranaense (Brazil) and Kyoto Purple Sanga (Japan). If Reading ever make it in to Europe then…. Oh, who are we kidding… µ