Looking to the Potential of EFL Brand Sponsorship for UK Businesses

Brand sponsorship can take many, many forms. You can get yourself some high-quality vinyl stickers to get your logo out there on displays and vehicles, you can sponsor events and good causes, and even get your brand on the shirts and jerseys of sports teams. In all instances, the aim of the game is to increase brand awareness, create customer loyalty, enhance the image of your brand – partly through association – and increase revenue. Exposure is a big part of what marketing teams look for when weighing up brand sponsorship deals.

As a result, many look to sports teams. Commanding good-sized audiences every week in stadiums is one side of the appeal, but so too is the branding that remains on merchandise, as well as the ever-growing TV audiences – particularly for UK football leagues. While there are plenty of sports options out there, from rugby league to ice hockey, here, we’re looking at the EFL for potential brand sponsorship deals.

Power of UK Football Leagues

 

Image by Kelvin Stuttard from Pixabay

The Premier League is a colossal product. In fact, the latest figures of its global viewership, engagement levels, and merchandise sales suggest it’s one of the UK’s biggest global exports. The league is broadcast to 189 countries, with some 900 million homes around the world having access to the competition. From that potential audience, 1.87 billion people interact weekly with the league through the media.

A major advance was made last season in the biggest of big-money sports market: the US. Broadcaster NBC reported that an average of 546,000 people tuned in for Premier League games in 2023/24, with the last day of the campaign drawing in 2.9 million Americans. It’s a huge amount of reach, which is why brands around the world clamour to get a deal with a club to have their brands on the advertising boards and, especially, on the shirts.

Naturally, there isn’t a fixed rate for clubs to offer sponsorship placements on their shirts. Arsenal landed their Emirates deal at a rate of £50 million per season, and Manchester City’s levels out at £40 million per year. Chelsea, entering a consecutive season without a front shirt sponsor, are reportedly seeking £60 per year in a long-term deal (despite not being in the UEFA Champions League) to help their unconventional spending and contract structure.

At the other end of the spectrum, clubs will accept eight or even seven figures for their sponsorship deals – especially if the deals are arranged before entering the Premier League. Brentford’s deal that started in 2019 costs around £4 million per year, but it was signed two years before the Bees achieved promotion and will run to 2025. It shows the potential for a kind of investment in sponsoring lower-tier teams that can then go up to even larger audiences.

Lots of Appeal in the EFL

Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash

Along with the potential to reach the Premier League, the EFL – particularly the Championship – boasts quite the audience itself. In Europe, the Championship, League One, and League Two combines to form the highest-attended league body, and last season, it broke its all-time attendance record. This figure saw over 23.7 million people pass through the turnstiles, and all three leagues of the EFL rank in the top 15 for the highest attendance in Europe.

It’s because of this that major brands are happy to bet on non-Premier League clubs. There’s a lot of brand exposure and good brand association to be gained from an EFL deal. A prime example would be one of  the top-ranked casino operators in the UK, which has itself a distinctly American brand and logo, Mr Vegas. Mr Vegas receives its high rating due to its extensive games' library, cashback offers, and its partnership with Sheffield Wednesday, which provides the brand with significant exposure. In addition, the deal has also generated positive feedback.

On a viewership front, things are certainly improving. UK live audiences averaged at over 300,000 per live EFL game, which marked a 43 per cent increase from 2022/23 to 2023/24. In the Championship alone, the live audience increased by 51 per cent to 330,000. Now, in 2024/25, over 1,000 games are broadcast live in the UK, and a new rights deal in the US was agreed with CBS Sports agreeing to air at least 250 EFL matches each season.

The EFL won’t ever be able to boast the pulling power of the Premier League or offer the same degree of benefit to brand sponsorship deals. Yet, there’s a lot of opportunity here to attract fans, get significant exposure, and maybe even break into the upper echelons at a lower rate than top clubs demand.