Money makes the world go round - and nowhere is this more evident than in the cash-rich world of football.
To take a small example, clubs in the top five leagues in Europe carried out transfers worth over half a billion euros in the 31-day January 2020 transfer window.
Another area that deals in big figures is in shirt sponsorships. The English Premier League alone generated 400 million euros in deals for the 2019-2020 season, and clubs around the world rely on such agreements to fund their sporting ambitions.
A consequence of this is that often clubs will just sell to the highest bidder, regardless of how ridiculous it makes their shirt look, or how shady the sponsor is.
Here we’re going to take a look at the most bizarre:
Portsmouth – Ty
There are many things that people associate with a typical football fan. They like a beer or two, perhaps, and to sing rowdy songs after a few of them.
If you were to suggest soft and cuddly Beanie Babies toys, however, you might get a few strange looks. But this is what happened to English outfit Portsmouth in the early 2000s, when makers Ty reached a three-year agreement to sponsor the club.
Now, it might be difficult to picture fans cuddling the things while watching a game, but there might be one similarity at least. The most sought-after Beanie Babies can command six-figure sums from interested buyers - rather like their Premier League counterparts.
Getafe - Burger King
Professional athletes advertising junk food is one thing, but when a weird mascot gets thrown into the mix, too, then questions are going to be asked.
The ‘Burger King’ was a grotesque-looking character who was revealed whenever a player celebrated a goal ‘Ravanelli-style’, that is pulling their shirt over their head to reveal the inside lining. So, not only were Getafe’s junior fans being encouraged to eat junk food by their favourite club, they were also scared out of their wits whenever their heroes scored a goal.
There was one silver lining, though. The Madrid team finished sixth in La Liga that year, the highest in the club’s history up to that point. Maybe they should find some more freaky characters.
AC Milan - Pooh Jeans
Normally, when companies try out product names, they run the word through a language check to make sure that it isn’t offensive or funny in another language. The famous Polish ‘Fart Bar’, with ‘fart’ meaning to break wind in English, is a great example of that.
It’s something that seemed to have passed Italian club AC Milan by in the 90s. After agreeing a deal with Pooh Jeans, the club printed it on all of their shirts, happily unaware that, to thousands of their English fans, ‘pooh’ is a slang word for excrement.
This could have made them the target of many toilet humour jokes from their rivals Inter Milan, but instead no one seemed to notice, and the team continued to be one of the best in Europe in the early 80s. In fact, quite the opposite of ‘pooh’.
Wolves and Crystal Palace - ManBetx
For a company displaying their logo on the front of two Premier League club shirts, you’d expect them to have a slick website waiting for you when you search online.
Their name alone suggests the possibility of placing a football bet or having a spin in an online casino; something to pass the time on a rainy day.
But a quick Google shows next to nothing; just a site in Chinese without a translate option - which begs the question, why exactly do they want Western audiences to know their name if they don’t have a product to offer in return?
In Wolves’ case, their previous shirt sponsor was W88, another gambling site, which seems to have started a pattern of replacing one betting company with another. Luckily, there are thousands of other gambling sites available on the internet. So, if the club’s sponsorship team decide they need to change it again, they’ll have plenty to choose from – but it might be a good idea to pick one that is available to Western players, too.
Clydebank - Wet Wet Wet
A lot of cool things happened in the UK in the 90s. Britpop was up and running, with bands like Oasis sauntering around in sunglasses and Manchester City shirts. The Lightning Seeds recorded one of the most famous football anthems of all time in Football’s Coming Home. DJ Fatboy Slim declared his love for Brighton and Hove Albion by sponsoring them, and eventually bidding to buy them.
Maybe not quite as cool was cheesy pop band Wet Wet Wet’s sponsorship of little-known Clydebank FC in Scotland. As well as their major hit ‘Love is All Around’ probably not being in most fan’s CD collection, the huge sponsor plastered all over the front just looked...a little strange.
It was a partnership that was dropped after a while, but at least the Scottish band could claim they’d sponsored their hometown club.
Atletico Madrid - Columbia Pictures
Atletico were known to be in heavy financial trouble at the turn of the millennium, which led them to accept pretty much anything that was offered to them.
So, when Columbia Pictures proposed a revolutionary new method, they weren’t in a position to say ‘no’.
It wasn’t so much the sponsor itself that puzzled fans when it was announced in 2003, it was the fact that the image on the shirt changed to whichever Columbia movie was being released that week.
That meant some weird and wonderful designs appeared over the season: take your pick from the likes of White Chicks or Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid as the most bizarre.
So, the next time your team announces a cringeworthy sponsor, bear in mind that it probably doesn’t involve having ‘pooh’ on your shirt, or even a cuddly toy. It could always be worse!
Back to the Soccer Newsfeed