MLS allowed its teams to have shirt sponsor. The average shirt sponsor is around $2 mil a year. Assuming WPS will get around 1/3 as much, that's $700,000, which would go a long way for this new league.
Why is this even a question? Of course they can and should. As long as their uniforms don't end up looking like some of the European women's ones I've seen (ten sponsors plastered on every square inch of jersey and shorts possible)
Has WPS said anything about shirt sponsor? MLS didn't allow it until 2007. We will find out if any of the 8 teams will have a shirt sponsor when the season start in 2009.
Technically I like the idea, but frankly I got used to the WUSA jerseys, too. Not sure I really care for this league oddly (I hated mid 90's MLS kits).
Why do you have the assumption that they can't have a sponsor? Did you read something some where? If so, could you apply a link? Did you have a quota of polls that you needed to start this week?
Hey! Well, you just said why - because you can really make those uniforms look cheap-city. Personally I hate sponsors on uniforms. In any discussion, for instance, on why (or why not) soccer is the greatest sport, I would always have to list shirt sponsors as one of the "why not" reasons. There's a lot of stuff wrong with "American" sports, but one thing they have right is that they don't have sponsors on the jerseys. It will be a sad day when the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Red Sox have some blasted sponsor plastered on their jerseys! I kind of hate to see the women start out this way (with shirt sponsors). I'm open to persuasion because we all know the sport needs the money. At the very least I would say this: there should be a minimum (a very significant minimum) dollar amount (should I say Euro amount in light of the dollar's devaluation?) required for shirt sponsorship. Don't cheapen the sport for piddling amounts of money.
So say a team's budget is 2 mil (because that's probably going to be the average team budget) and a team can get 500k in shirt sponsorship, that's a quarter of their budget. Your saying turn down a quarter of your budget because you don't like the look? I think anything that helps the teams and the league get closer to breaking even or making a profit is a good thing.
Emphasis mine. That's a pretty big range, going from a half-million dollars to "anything", don't you think? I wouldn't call quarter of the budget "piddling". I qualified my statement and left room for persuasion but I'm not going to be persuaded by arguments that equate "anything" with a half-million per team. Does anyone have reason to think half-million is even realistic at this point?
I'm curious. How many MLS teams even have a shirt sponsor? Looking here at our trusty BigSoccer shop, I only saw 3 teams that have a shirt sponsor: LA Galaxy (Herbalife), Toronto (BMO), and NY Red Bulls (Red Bull) - if you can even call Red Bull a sponsor since they own the team. Where do we get that $2 million figure that promises a pot o' gold for our new womens' league?
Don't forget the Chicago Fire will have BESTBUY on front of their Jerseys starting this year. I absolutely agree tha its OK to advertise on Jerseys as long as it looks good and not something tasteless or ugly. Those days of "purity of the sport" are long gone and one day the three major sports will do the same. It's just a matter of time.
At first I thought you must've been thinking about Guadalajara Chivas, the parent team. What a sponsor that would be for the women's league: Bimbo! But now I see some game photos of Chivas USA with "Comex" on them. So we also have Chivas USA, Houston (Amigo Energy), Real Salt Lake (Xango) and Chicago (Best Buy). Okay, there's a trend here on the men's side and the money involved is significant. Again, it's one thing if corporate sponsors are willing to invest a substantial sum in the women's game. It's another thing if they aren't. You don't want to cheapen the product unnecessarily and there's something to be said for building up the brand first before you commercialize its very identity. MLS waited 10 years. The major sports in general are in position to cash in big-time if they decide to, but they're able to do it now only because the brand-names, the teams, have an identity built up over years and years, rather than having their identities change hands like shares on the stock market.
A jersey sponsor is an extremely small price to pay for no commercial/media timeouts during games. I'll make that tradeoff any day. Unless they use Chivas' and Monterrey's shirt sponsor, that would make the women's players look cheap indeed...
That's the average for MLS teams that have shirt sponsor. Around $2 mil a year. Check MLS News and Analysis.
As I thought - the figure is based only on the teams that have them. Nevertheless the number seems to be growing quickly and the value of the deals seem substantial, and not completely skewed by, ummm, David Beckham and Herbalife's deal with the Galaxy. Although that's the thing, would any of these deals be worth nearly this much if it wasn't for the arrival of a certain Englishman? Considering the exponential effect that Beckham has had on merchandise sales for both the league and the Galaxy, how realistic is it to extrapolate merchandise figures for the women's league from MLS sales?
Unfortunately, sponsor advertising on jerseys is almost by definition tasteless and tacky. Very few manage to avoid it. You have a favorite baseball, basketball, hockey team from your youth? Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Giants? Lakers, Celtics, Knicks? Red Wings, Bruins, Canadiens, Maple Leafs? Now, what would it be like if you were looking at photographs of your favorite players, or classic moments in their history, and in place of their team names, some corporate sponsors were plastered on? Companies that have bought naming rights to stadiums and arenas or bowl games, including some that have gone the way of the corporate trash heap: Enron. TWA. PSINet. Poulan Weed Eater. (That last one was brought up by an amusing EPSN article recently on worst college bowl game, Independence Bowl in Shreveport) Would it spoil it a bit for you? Would it take some of the magic away?
I always thought it amusing that one of the tournament sponsors on the Ladies Golf tour is Chick-Fil-A.
So question - you have a choice between no jersey sponsors and 20 minutes of TV timeouts during matches, or one jersey sponsor and zero TV timeouts - which do you choose? Would you pay $5 more to attend a match if it meant no jersey sponsor? It's easy to want it all as a fan, but if teams in a fledgling league need to recoup their investment somehow, what would you be willing to give up in return for no shirt sponsors? The 'favorite leagues of our youth' above have prostituted themselves in every other way possible, I would not hold them up as a shining light for anything.
"Real" classy. What the heck is "bwin" anyway? Is it anything like a positively rechanneled "he hate me?" No wonder David Beckham left Real Madrid. Even he looked cheap in those jerseys. Premier League powerhouse Chelsea jersey - you could be driving the company van in this. At best, it looks like something for the company BBQ? "You can remove your seatbelt and I can take your drink order now."
Explore, okay. To actually do it... hmmn... Maybe this is what DCUPopeandLilly has in mind. But I will say, you can see this picture a different way. You know how a good-looking woman can wear the equivalent of having one arm tied behind her back and still deliver a knockout. Bad jerseys and all, you still want to know who some of these women are from the Swedish powerhouse Umeå.
Well, we wouldn't want that (TV timeouts) - true! So, wow, I guess that's a big one to consider! Is that really the choice? I haven't followed soccer all my life and I'm primarily a fan of the women, so I really didn't know that. I didn't know that English Premier League games (and before that Divsion One) had TV timeouts before the days of shirt sponsors. And Serie A. And the Bundesliga. And the Spanish League. And MLS, as someone pointed out earlier, only began having sponsors a year or so ago. Before that they had TV timeouts?! I really had no idea. Soccer fans used to tell me one of the beautiful things of their game was that there were no timeouts. Each half was 45 minutes and you played 45 minutes without stopping the clock. Well, maybe I can be persuaded. In fact, if this is the difference between TV timeouts and not, we should have the NBA and NFL start signing up shirt sponsors immediately because I absolutely hate how long those games take to play. Seriously - is that the choice? Get shirt sponsors and then an NBA game wouldn't take 20 minutes to play the last 2 minutes on the game clock?!