Football shirts chart the rise and fall of tech giants | Hacker News Reader

Football shirts chart the rise and fall of tech giants

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85 pointsthm71 comments

I have never really understood the value of soccer jersey sponsoring. It's gotta be a "we-have-too-much-money-and-don't-know-what-to-do-with-it" phenomena.

Probably makes sense for sports betting companies.

Yes, that's a valid point. I guess the same is true for sport brands.

My team Coventry city FC are sponsored by an Irish betting company, as are a lot of UK Championship and some premier league teams. I hate that and won't be buying replica shirt...

> My team Coventry city FC …

I wanted to jokingly quote this and say something silly like “My sincerest condolences” - but I realised I haven’t paid attention to the English leagues in a while. Just checked now and it looks like Coventry have sort of recovered and are back on track! After some pretty woeful times that’s very good to see, I have a soft spot for them as I had a friend at uni who was a supporter :-)

I think the Championship (the one below the premier league) is a lot more fun and local. The problem with european professional football is that it is rapidly losing its identity. The oligarch owned teams have players from all over he world and the location of the home stadiums are increasingly meaningless.

Coventry City came close to promotion to the prem last season but I actually dread to think if they would survive a first season despite the huge money involved and how the team's local identity might change...

Man you're preaching to the choir there :) My team - Aberdeen - were once a formidable force in European football, but due to the big leagues swimming in money there is absolutely no chance of that being repeated for us. Only way would be if for some reason some mystery rich guys took interest in Scottish football, but we're extremely wary of that, and rightly so IMO. Dundee, Hearts, Gretna have experienced the thrills of big money flowing in, and the sudden heartache of it suddenly disappearing. Even Celtic and Rangers are struggling - Rangers reached the Europa League final this year but only by repeating the reckless spending that got them into financial trouble a few years back. At least by being a large-ish team on the English pyramid there's a remote chance you'll have the resources and capability to compete at the very top level at some point, so there's hope for you yet!

And there's no shame in ping-ponging up and down between the Premiership and the Championship a few times - just look at Norwich :) Main thing is that Coventry have turned a corner.

Fulham (who I saw City beat 1-3 at Craven Cottage in April) and Norwich make a lot of money being promoted and relegated (parachute payments etc) it's a weird glich in the footie matrix..

Bragging rights. ”That’s my company, right there on the left shoulder of Wayne G”

"GOODYEAR" plastered across a quarterback's ass would be good just for the giggle factor.

I never understood why Pirelli was Inter Milan's sponsor for more than 2 decades. I always thought to myself: What's the return of investment there?

But then I realized I only know Pirelli because of that sponsorship.

Now I have never bought a tyre in my entire life and I couldn't care less about tyres but as far as brand recognition is considered that investment has worked.

My car came with higher end perellis. Was not that impressed by them, but could be my bad luck.

After hitting a fairly big pot hole, it caused a major bubble to form on the side of the rubber. Switched them out for Michelin and haven't had an issue 2 sets later

It's almost like the F1 tires have nothing to do with the consumer tires.. hmm.

Brand failure? I think so.

My Michelin's are fine and grip effectively.

Yup, not going to see pot holes on the streets they race formula one (I hope).

What's the problem? Just do a pit stop, get the wheels changed in 2.5s and get back on the street in no time. The other drivers have to come in as well.

Michelin is another interesting one with their whole Michelin Star food/restaurant thing.

I have no citation for this, but it seems like Michelin guides started off as advertising (to get people driving in France during early adoption of cars) but is probably now a separate (presumably profitable) business.

The Michelin guide still uses the Michelin man and the stylistic iconography of the tire brand as theirs. I believe they’re still fully integrated

Yes, it was to get people driving more.

1 Michelin Star = worth stopping for

2 Stars = worth a detour

3 Stars = worth a trip just to eat there

If you recognize the brand but have never been inclined to make a purchase... it hasn't worked.

if a larger number of people purchased the product only after the campaign started, even if GP didn't purchase, the campaign has worked.

Sometimes the point of the advertising is to make you ignore its competitors.

We both know what Patek Philippe and Bugatti are, have you ever wanted to buy one?

Actually I only know the latter, not the former, and no. However, the point was that if the advertisement does not incline me to buy because of the sheer absurdity of its location and timing then it doesn't work. Shotgunning ad dollars at random shit and hoping it works is how we get spam.

you are getting downvoted but i learned something from your comment

I dont think you can judge all Ad ROI on thr basis of pure unit purchases. I'd argue the key metric is gross dollars.

Why? Because if an ad campaign by bugatti elevated the price point bt which existing customers buy, just based on perception of nonbuying customers... Then that is a success

The only way that could be valid is if the price one was willing to pay was positively influenced by nonbuyers, i.e. even if someone else doesn't want to buy it they regard it as some manner of status symbol and, therefore, influence you to pay a higher price for it. I do not regard a bugatti as such, but your mileage may vary.

So I vaguely recognise the brand, probably because of this sort of thing, but until this moment I had no idea they made tires. If you’d pressed me I’d probably have said beer, though I now realise I’m thinking of Peroni.

So maybe not _terribly_ effective brand advertising, then.

It's not made to have you go buy tires, but to remember them when you're at a tire shop and see them on the shelf.

This. When you get the call saying you need new tyres and they list 2 brands you’ve never heard of and Pirelli there’s a greater chance you’ll pay the premium over an unknown.

I had a similar reaction when redoing our kitchen. The chap listed some meaningless flooring brands to me. Except one of them was Quick-Step…

“Like the pro cycling team?!” says I like a big kid.

Guess what we walk on in our kitchen now?

Plus I get to tell all my cycling buddies whenever they come round for the first time.

Same goes for silicone window sealant. The brands mean nothing to an amateur like me but when I see Soudal brand at the store I think of the cycling team and so that’s the brand I buy.

Only for the record, for about 20-25 years (between roughly 1990 and 2015) Pirelli was active in many fields besides tyres, including:

real estate -> now Prelios

electric and fibre cables -> now Prysmian

coated steel cables -> then sold to Bekaert

glasses and optical systems -> then sold to Corning and Cisco

Nowadays the focus is on tyres and the property is essentially Chinese (Chemchina).

In the mentioned years they also made broadband (ADSL) modem/routers, clothing, design glasses, and what not.

Pirelli one actually makes a lot of sense not for the general consumer, but for cross recognition with F1.

The solely owned the F1 contract via regulation. Brand recognition is an ambiguous yet important way to maintain that. The bigwigs who help build the regulations of F1, you have to believe a number of them watch football.

My knowledge of Pirelli came about from the Pirelli calendar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirelli_Calendar

Pirelli is based in Milan.

It is sponsoring the older home town team.

mmmh, no? AC Milan is the older (1899), Inter seccessed from it in 1908.

Yes, I was wrong.

Do you think cosmic rays could have flipped that least important bit in my comment?

Well if you are a fan, that is _not_ the least important bit in your comment ;)

Maybe the execs just like going to the games in luxury boxes. You do get a little more than your name on the kit.

The ROI is hard to know but there certainly is value.

Are you questioning the value of all impression based marketing?

If you don't know the ROI then you cannot compute the value... and hence you're not even wrong.

There was an article investigating something similar about a month ago - The Economics of Stadium Names: Sell your stock in (most) companies that buy them https://axiomalpha.com/the-economics-of-stadium-names/

and look at 2021 crypto naming spree...

It's too bad we don't know the names of the other companies that bid for the rights, not the amounts. They might be just as bad as the winners.

> all 10 companies underperformed. That’s compelling, but not quite statistically significant.

I would say at a rate of 10/10, those results don’t need statistics to be considered significant, the only issue is the sample size could be larger. Am I missing something? Or is the author conflating significance with confidence?

A company booth for the enjoyment of a select few.

Either your company has to be prove it’s a ‘big name’ to grow further (for instance your biggest competitor is Google or ebay) and it’s a way to show you’re strong enough to do that kind of thing. It’s the big version of your sales people driving Lexus to their client meetings.

Either you’ve reached a strong position but people have no recognition for it and still see you as some also-ran. It’s a way to throw money at the problem.

I wonder if share prices are correlated with the start/end of any given advertising campaign.

Not sure about the value in the top leagues, but in second tier leagues it’s very much a local thing. Often the local bank will be the main sponsor, and the big employers in town will be lower tier sponsors. Often it’s part of a package which includes a VIP box, sponsorship dinners with the club and so on. Difficult to calculate the ROI, but the bank/company can “brag” that they support the local club (and often they also sponsor childrens sport and other activities as well) and use that in advertisement. It’s about making an impression of local belonging. And sometimes it’s just the owner being a fan.

Like almost all traditional advertising, it's just about name/brand recognition. Almost nobody sees a geico ad and decides to go out and buy car insurance, so if direct sales lift was the objective, advertising is clearly a losing proposition. However, when someone decides they need insurance, there are probably a couple of companies whose names already stand out in their head, and that is when the advertising investment pays off.

"I see them all the time, ergo they must have spent a shitload of money on it ergo they make tons of money ergo they must be good. I trust them."

I can’t think of a better place to advertise to make your brand a household name.

I have a great Dreamcast jersey from this era. It was less me knowing about Dreamcast and more me getting the jersey because even though I know nothing about football, I recognized the name.

Interesting article. Wonder if similar analysis could be done with named sports stadiums.

There was a post on just this issue (financial impact of naming a sports stadium) on HN in the past few weeks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31620348

Related: FC Bayern Munich and Commodore (end of 80s):

https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/4a6ca31a-287e-4e94-85...

Speaking of tech, Google is a sponsor for Mclaren F1 team. The Mclaren Cars this year runs with a roundel similar to Chrome logo on their wheels. Cognizant is also a major sponser for another team, Aston Martin.

Oracle is the principal sponsor of Red Bull racing. Oracle reportedly paid $500 million for that deal.

I remember Panasonic being prominent sponsors of the Toyota team. Compaq were on the Williams cars, I think one of the first teams to replace cigarette sponsorship with a tech company

Speaking of Oracle, their so-called "match insights" (https://www.premierleague.com/news/2210969) is the crappiest addition to EPL. It gives the impression that either Oracle doesn't understand football, or Oracle Cloud is a bad technolgy.

Same happens with aws stats and predictions in f1. If some f1 fan doesn’t know what aws is, they would laugh about them.

Don't forget AWS sponsoring F1 itself.

> Oracle is the principal sponsor of Red Bull racing.

Huh I would have thought the principal sponsor of Red Bull racing would be... Red Bull? Isn't that point of a naming sponsorship?

Red Bull is not a sponsor but the owner of the team

Just a comment on design: I really like the "stacked cards" effect on mobile. Cool and not gimmicky.

Commodore used to sponsor Chelsea and Bayern Munich in the 80s. This isn't a recent phenomenon.

Remarkably people are still making replicas of those shirts.

https://www.3retro.com/brand/score-draw/bayern-munich/

It shows some weird value of these things. What other advertisement would people pay GBP 25 for almost 40 years later?

I don't think most people buy those for the sponsor logo on it, but maybe because it reminds them of the team's glory years.

Hitachi used to sponsor Liverpool in 1979 as well. You know how I know this? I read this article: https://restofworld.org/2022/football-shirt-tech-sponsorship...

I don't think that article (nor the one in the submission) claims that this is a recent phenomenon.

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