I've been in a lot of club commercial meetings over the last six years, and there's a moment in most of them I've come to recognise. Someone opens the spreadsheet.
Sometimes it's apologetic: "you'll have to excuse this." Often it's proud, and rightly so, because the person who built it has poured years into making it work. These files are usually impressive. Layers of structure and logic, built over seasons, holding the club's entire commercial operation together. In the fullest sense, they are that club's version of the truth.
They are also undefendable in a board meeting, impossible to collaborate on, and one resignation away from being meaningless. I want to talk about what that actually costs, because I don't think most clubs have ever added it up.
01The five ways it leaks money
If availability lives in a file that one person updates, availability is a guess. Two people can sell the same perimeter board in the same week and neither knows until a sponsor turns up on a matchday to find someone else's logo on it. The revenue is recoverable. The credibility isn't - a local business that's been double-sold tells other local businesses.
Enquiries arrive by email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram DM, a phone call to the club shop, a conversation in the car park. There is no single view of who is waiting for an answer - which is how a business that enquired in March is still waiting for a price in August. Every one of those is revenue the club had already won and then lost through process.
At most clubs, sponsor history lives with a person. What was agreed. What they paid last year. Why they nearly left in 2023 and what fixed it. When that person moves on, the club loses its entire commercial memory - and the sponsor who's been there six years has to explain who they are. That's the moment a lot of renewals quietly stop happening.
At a very large number of clubs, the answer to "has that sponsor paid?" is "I'll ask the treasurer." Chasing instalments requires a meeting. One event organiser described ending a season with nearly thirty thousand pounds of unpaid sponsorship to chase down afterwards. That's not unusual. It's just rarely said out loud.
Ask a club what it has to sell and you'll get the shirt and the boards. Ask again, properly, and you'll find match balls, player sponsorship, hospitality, dugouts, training kit, stand naming, junior kits, tournament days and the car park. Most clubs sell three or four. A well-organised club sells fifteen.
02Now add up the tools
Clubs that recognise the spreadsheet problem usually try to fix it by buying software. Sensible instinct. The problem is they end up buying five different pieces of it.
| What they buy | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Sponsor CRM | from £30/month |
| Asset and inventory management | from £20/month |
| Email and marketing | from £15/month |
| Proposals and e-signatures | from £25/month |
| Website and storefront | from £20/month |
| Payment processing | fees on every transaction |
| Over £1,500 a year - the floor, for one small club |
Six logins. Six bills. Six renewal dates. And critically, six systems that don't talk to each other, which means someone is still copying information between them. You've spent £1,500 to recreate the spreadsheet, only now it's spread across six places instead of one. It gets worse at scale, because most of these tools charge per user and per seat. You are being charged more for growing.
03What "good" actually looks like
I run a company that sells the solution to this problem, and that makes me an unreliable narrator about whether you need one. So let me describe the outcome rather than the product. Whoever you buy from, or if you build it yourself, these are the things that matter.
One record, not five. The listing, the conversation about it, the proposal that came from it and the payment that settled it should be the same object - not four objects in four systems a human keeps in sync.
Context that travels. Whoever answers a sponsor's question should see which asset it's about, what was discussed, what was agreed last season and what's been paid. Without asking anyone.
Records that belong to the club. If someone leaves tomorrow, the club should lose their skills and their relationships, not its data.
Availability that's true. If a board is sold, every person who could sell that board should see it's sold, immediately, without being told.
Money that has a paper trail. The treasurer should be able to see status rather than be asked for it.
A shop window. Everything the club has to sell, visible to a business that doesn't know anybody at the club.
None of that is exotic. It's the same infrastructure every other industry rebuilt fifteen years ago.
04Why football is late to this
Retail did this. Travel did this. Property did this. Why is football still running on spreadsheets? Three reasons. The buyer was never the person with the problem - enterprise sponsorship software exists and it's very good, but it's built and priced for the top two per cent of football. The tools that reached the rest asked for money upfront - a hard internal sell for a volunteer committee. And nobody built the transaction layer - almost every tool helps a club administer sponsorship it has already sold. Almost none help it sell, and virtually none settle the money.
Clubs have been offered better filing cabinets, when what they needed was a shop and a till.
05Three questions worth sitting with
If you got a better job tomorrow, how much of what you know would the club still have next month? If the honest answer is "not much", that's not a reflection on you. It's a structural risk the club is carrying without knowing it.
Most clubs can handle their current number. The question is whether the same process survives twenty per cent more. Given the gambling ban has just removed a major sponsor category from the top of the game, a lot of clubs are about to find out.
If a sponsor asked today what they got for their money last season, could you show them? Not tell them. Show them. This is becoming the difference between renewal and a polite decline.
The spreadsheet isn't the problem. The spreadsheet is a symptom. Football sponsorship has been run for decades on relationships, memory and goodwill, and every one of those things is brilliant right up until the moment it doesn't scale. Our industry deserves better rails. Not more effort from the people already giving everything they've got.
Sponsorfy is the commercial and payments infrastructure for football clubs. CRM, live inventory, proposals, payment schedules, storefront, QR codes and analytics - one platform, one login. Free for clubs. We take 8% only when a deal is paid.
- Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance
- FORZA State of Grassroots Football Report: ~75% of clubs report insufficient funding
- KORE Software: $10bn+ in sponsorship assets processed annually across 1,000+ clients
- 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.
