Something has shifted in our industry over the last two years, and I don't think football has fully caught up with it yet. Sponsors have started asking what they got. Not in a hostile way. In the ordinary way that any business asks about any line of expenditure. What did we spend, what did it deliver, should we do it again.
Money on that scale attracts scrutiny, and the scrutiny has arrived. Marketing directors who once approved sponsorship on instinct now sit in front of finance directors who want a number. Here's the problem. Most football clubs cannot answer these questions. Not because they didn't deliver - most clubs deliver more than they promised - but because nobody was measuring.
01What renewal conversations sound like now
The old renewal conversation went something like this. "Another year?" "Go on then." That worked because the relationship carried it. The new renewal conversation, increasingly, goes like this:
Before we commit again, what did we actually get last season?
And this is where clubs get caught out. Because the honest answer for many is a version of: your logo was on the board, we posted about you twice, and you came to three games. All true. None of it evidence. The sponsor isn't being difficult. They're being asked the same question by their own finance team, and "we've always done it" is no longer a sufficient answer anywhere.
02Why this hits the middle and bottom of the pyramid hardest
There's an assumption that measurement is a big-club problem. It's the opposite. A Premier League club selling a £5m front-of-shirt partnership is dealing with a sponsor who has an agency measuring the return on their behalf. Go down the pyramid and that support disappears entirely.
A £15,000 local sponsor at a National League club has no agency. No media monitoring. No brand tracking. What they have is a business owner sitting at a kitchen table in April, looking at a list of outgoings, asking themselves whether the football thing was worth it. If the club can't help them answer that, the answer defaults to instinct, and instinct in a difficult quarter says cut it.
The clubs with the least measurement capability have the sponsors most in need of being convinced. That's the gap. And with the gambling ban pushing clubs from a few large deals to many smaller ones, every one of those smaller sponsors is a renewal conversation requiring evidence the club has never had to produce before.
03What sponsors actually want to know
What they ask for is rarely sophisticated. It's just specific.
Was I seen? Not estimated impressions. Actual, attributable interaction. How many people scanned the code on my board. How many clicked through from the club's post.
Did anything come of it? How many enquiries reached my business through the club. Did anyone mention seeing me at the ground.
Did you deliver what you promised? If the deal included four social posts, two matchday mentions and a hospitality table, were all of those delivered? Sponsors remember what didn't happen far more clearly than what did.
Who is your audience? Not "we get two thousand a game". Where are they from, what do they do, and are they the people I'm trying to reach?
How do I compare? Is this good, relative to what I'd get spending the same money elsewhere?
None of that requires enterprise analytics. All of it requires having captured something in the first place.
04The measurement problem is an infrastructure problem
Clubs aren't failing to measure because they don't value measurement. They're failing to measure because there is nothing in the process where measurement could attach. A logo goes on a physical board. A post goes out on Instagram. A guest attends a game. An invoice gets paid by bank transfer. Four events, none connected, none recorded against the sponsor, none producing data.
You cannot report on what was never captured. This is why sponsorship measurement in football is not a reporting problem. It's a plumbing problem. If the transaction, the relationship and the activity all run through the same place, measurement is a by-product. If they don't, measurement is a research project that nobody has time for.
05What clubs can capture, starting now
Asset-level views. If your inventory is listed somewhere public, you know how many people looked at each asset. That gives a sponsor a real number.
Scans and clicks. A QR code on a perimeter board is a measurement instrument. A physical board that has historically produced no data at all suddenly produces a weekly number.
Enquiries generated. If a sponsor's presence produced enquiries to their business, that is the single most valuable number in the entire report - and almost no club currently records it.
Delivery against contract. Simply evidencing that everything promised was delivered, with dates. Unglamorous, and the number one thing that protects a renewal.
Audience composition. "Two thousand people, seventy per cent within eight miles" is a completely different proposition to a local business than "two thousand people".
Put a trackable link or QR code against every sponsored asset. Record delivery as it happens - date, what was delivered, evidence; it takes two minutes a week. And ask your sponsors what they'd want to see. The call itself does more for the relationship than the report ever will.
There's a bigger prize too. At Auto Trader we had a product called Retail Check - it told a dealer what a car was actually worth in their region, based on real market data. One dealer's data is an anecdote. Seven thousand dealers' data is a market. Football sponsorship has never had that. Every club prices in isolation, which means some are leaving money on the table and others are pricing themselves out of deals, and none of them know which. That layer is only available to whoever sits on the transaction.
06Where this ends up
Our industry is heading in one direction. Sponsorship is being asked to behave like every other line of marketing spend - measurable, comparable, defensible. That's uncomfortable for clubs who've built commercial operations on relationships and trust. It's also the best thing that could happen to them.
Because the clubs that can prove value will charge more for it. Right now, a club with brilliant local engagement and a club with none charge roughly the same for a perimeter board, because neither can demonstrate the difference. Measurement doesn't commoditise sponsorship. It rewards the clubs doing it well and currently getting no credit.
Football sponsorship has been the last significant marketing spend in this country to run on instinct. That era is closing. The clubs that get ahead of it won't just retain their sponsors. They'll be able to charge properly for the first time.
Sponsorfy is the commercial and payments infrastructure for football clubs. Every asset gets a shareable link and QR code, every view, scan, click and enquiry is tracked, and every deal is recorded against the sponsor it belongs to. Free for clubs, from the Premier League to grassroots.
- Global sports sponsorship market: $103.92bn (2026), forecast $185.94bn by 2035, CAGR 7.1%
- Sponsorship audit expenditure increased by over 15% amid fragmented cross-platform measurement
- Growing proportion of sponsorship deals structured around rights-holder fan data quality
- Premier League front-of-shirt gambling sponsorship ban from 2026/27, estimated £80m annual league-wide impact
Mark is the founder and CEO of Sponsorfy. He spent seven years at Auto Trader, reaching sales director, and has spent the last six years working with clubs from the Premier League to grassroots on the infrastructure behind football sponsorship.
