Real Sports Betting: Chelsea F.C. Gambles on Long-Term Partnership

A year ago, I wrote a post about the many questions raised by what has now been confirmed as Infinite Athlete’s one-year front-of-jersey sponsorship for top English Premier League club Chelsea F.C. I ended it with, “It will be very interesting to see where the sponsorship and Infinite Athlete’s new business numbers are a year from now.”

While it was unlikely that the sports technology provider would provide insight into the sponsorship’s ROI, the expectation was that the club’s future top-level partnership status would come into much sharper focus by now, most likely with the signing of a new, longer-term shirt sponsor.

But just as last year’s season began without any branding on Chelsea players’ chests (the Infinite Athlete deal wasn’t concluded until eight matches had been played), the club kicked-off this year at home against Manchester City on Sunday in the same situation.

As in 2023, Chelsea is expected to sign its second straight one-year jersey deal soon, although it will not be with Infinite Athlete, which has a seven-year partnership with the club that includes its logo on the sleeve of Chelsea’s training kit for this season.

It appears that the team is again rolling the dice that it will improve its on-field performance and will qualify for the UEFA Champions League, putting it in a much-improved position for negotiating a lucrative, long-term jersey partnership in 2025.

Having lost that gamble in 2023-24, the club reportedly expects its shirt sponsor this year to pay the same as Infinite Athlete did last season, an estimated $50 million. The Athletic has reported that Chelsea executives expect to reap in the neighborhood of $78 million a year if the team can make the UCL, Europe’s elite club competition.

Is Chelsea wise to wait until it can deliver a Champions League appearance to its top partner? There are many arguments to be made that it is a smart strategy, especially if the addition of key players and other circumstances make it more likely that the club can qualify this year.

Key to that thinking is that the one-year, $50-million-a-year deals for last year and this are far from fire-sale pricing. Had the team tried to sign a long-term partner in early 2023, it perhaps could have expected an annual fee in the neighborhood of $58 million. In that scenario, a five-year deal signed last year would be worth a total of $290 million through 2028. If Chelsea is able to secure a five-year deal next year for the $78 million a year it wants, it will earn $334 million over the same period. Even if the term were reduced to three years, the club would earn $178 million versus $174 million.

The situation is not unique to Chelsea. These kinds of calculations are made all the time because, rightly or wrongly, a significant percentage of sponsorship value for sports teams is based on how many wins, playoffs, tournament appearances and championships they can accrue.

The bottom line is that Chelsea is probably doing the right thing, even though a few key injuries or the other vagaries of sport could rear their ugly heads and upend the strategy yet again.

But beyond the revenue projections, Chelsea and other rights holders in similar positions also need to determine the impact of rotating sponsors/no sponsors on the club’s brand and image. While the multimillion-dollar “profits” in the above scenarios are nothing to sneeze at, they do come at some immediate reputational cost of being the only EPL club without a jersey partner.