The big companies in today’s world are sponsoring global soccer clubs like there is no tomorrow. The arabic airline “Emirates” supports 9 (!) teams at once, including the current Champions-League champion Real Madrid. Red Bull takes the concept of sponsoring a team one step further and owns five teams at the same time. One can easily say that the energy-drink manufacturer from Austria is the main sponsor of “Red Bull Salzburg”, “New York Red Bulls”, “Red Bull Ghana”, “Red Bull Brasil” and the German club “RB Leipzig”. In other words: Red Bull is standing on top of the Sponsoring-pyramid by themselves. But what is exactly is this pyramid?
The following picture shows the classical Sponsorship Pyramid. The Sponsoring-Pyramid is a theoretical construct to describe the scaling of sponsorship-packages. The “Main-Sponsorship” that only gets awarded once, is on top of the pyramid. One level below that, high-value packages can be found as well, although they get awarded more often (i.e “premium-packages”). The lower on the pyramid we go, the higher the amount of sponsors. The packages on the bottom of the pyramid get awarded a lot and provide lesser opportunities for differentiation for a sponsor.
In practice, the different packages are usually divided into “Gold-” “Silver-” and “Bronze”-Partners.
The higher a sponsor sits on the pyramid, the more money he is paying to the athlete or a club. It has become a common sight that executives concentrate on the higher levels of the pyramid, because they bring the most income. Far from it!
Especially when it comes down to amateur-sports,the lowest level can turn out to be the most important one, virtually the foundation of a stable sponsoring-culture within a club. The friendly bakery next door or the small fishing-shop down the street often have a high interest in supporting their local sports club. It is needless to say that family-owned businesses do not have a particularly high budget that can be spent for sponsoring. In this case, it is quantity over quality. Many small sponsors that are supporting a club with passion and pride are often more helpful than one giant main sponsor, who can destroy the whole club if he chooses to terminate his contract.
On Sponsoo.de, there are over 5.000 of athletes and clubs who would be happy to receive a small amount of money from potential sponsors. Why don’t you have a look at some of our profiles? Help athletes to build their very own foundation and have them represent your brand on a high level!
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