Author archive for ‘Carsten Thode’

The New Rules of the 4th Era of Sponsorship

Sponsorship is dead, long live sponsorship

 

Those of you who are regular readers of Synopsis may have spotted a pattern. The lead articles are not Synergy’s random musings but rather the building blocks of a bigger story about the new rules of sponsorship.

But before we get to the rules, a little bit of context. Like all marketing disciplines, sponsorship has evolved over time…but every now and then, there is a paradigm shift which generates an explosion of innovation and introduces a completely new way of acting. Excitingly, we have entered one of these new eras – the 4th Era of Sponsorship.

Below is a rough timeline of how the Sponsorship Industry has evolved. There is never a clear line in the sand to separate the various eras (and of course there are always sponsorship programmes that are ahead of their time), but to keep things simple, they can be broadly separated into decades.


1970s: The Dark Art

The very beginnings of the sponsorship industry were characterised by informal deals done on a handshake in smoke-filled rooms — often literally smoke-filled, as much of the early days of sponsorship were driven by cigarette brands putting their brand on the side of fast cars to circumvent advertising restrictions.


1980s – 1990s: Off-the-Peg

Patrick Nally is credited as being the founding father of modern sponsorship. His ground-breaking partnership deal with Coca-Cola for the 1978 FIFA World Cup effectively ‘invented’ the concept of a rights package. This has set the template for how sponsorships have been packaged and sold by rightsholders ever since.

2000s: Tailored

Brands started to become much more sophisticated and proactive in terms of how they approached sponsorship. No longer was it thought of as a collection of off-the-shelf rights or as a separate marketing channel, but rather as an asset that could be integrated into the overall marketing mix and used to increase the effectiveness of the brand’s marketing activity.

2010: Social

The 4th Era is the “Social Era” for two reasons. Firstly, it has been enabled by social media which has allowed people (and brands) with shared interests to engage with each other at a scale and depth that has never before been possible. Social also refers to a sense of ‘Higher Purpose’ – the ability of a sponsorship programme to connect with its audience by delivering something that really matters.

The Rules of the Social Era

 

Moving to the Social Era has changed the game of sponsorship and everyone can benefit from knowing the new rules. We have analysed hundreds of best practice case studies from the world of sponsorship and beyond to identify and codify the keys to success in the Social Era.

We have been examining these new rules one by one over the past 5 months but now it is time to bring them all together.

It’s as easy as ABCDE…

Rule 1: Authenticity

Endorses for Courses by Jon Izzard

The best sponsorship programmes, the ones that really resonate with the audience, feel completely natural. The brand simply feels at home in the space. Think of Red Bull and extreme sports, Cartier and Polo, Robinsons and Wimbledon, Unicef and FC Barcelona, Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games, Moët & Chandon and F1. There are loads of sources of authenticity: products, geography, heritage, brand message and simple longevity.

Some brands have to work hard to establish authenticity in a given space, but it is imperative that they do because the very audience that a sponsor is trying to connect with can see through an imposter straight away. Skoda’s sponsorship of the Tour de France provides a great example of a brand working hard to establish credibility in a space where its source of credibility may not be immediately obvious.  Brilliant:

Rule 2: Beyond your Brand

What Can Sponsorship Learn from Farmville by Liz Brown

Sponsorship is about a brand becoming a natural part of their customers’ lives — but the audience needs a reason to invite a brand into their lives.  Brands that view the relationship with their audience as a one-way value exchange and think only in terms of “what will we get out of it”, have no chance of forming the kind of relationship they want. Again, there are a number of ways that brands can demonstrate “Beyond your Brand” thinking, focusing on delivering benefits to their customers (O2 Priority), the property (Converse and London’s 100 Club) and society as a whole (RBS RugbyForce).

Rule 3: Content

Is Content Really King by Ben Wilkinson

Consumers want to learn, laugh, discover, share, be entertained and be inspired.  And they want to do all these things around topics that are of specific interest to them.  That is what sponsorship allows you to do: create relevant content around your audience’s passion points.  But brands have to be creative to capture attention — posting a video of “talking heads” on YouTube and hoping for the best is not enough.  Great content is about innovation.  It’s about finding something that connects and resonates with your audience and providing it how they want it, when they want it and where they want it.

Our favourite example of this is Converse Domaination — a campaign that not only puts great content at its heart but also shows a perfect understanding of its audience.  Enjoy.

Rule 4: Dialogue

D is for Dialogue by Carsten Thode

Talking to each other, sharing ideas, working together, creating things, discovering  new stuff,  having fun, laughing, crying, flirting, arguing – everything that makes life worth living is built on our ability to actively engage with each other. Why should that be different from the relationships we build with the brands in our lives?

Yet for most of its history, marketing has been pretty much a one-way conversation where brands tell you what they want you to know and the customer has no way of talking back.  However, the digital age, and particularly the social media age, has smashed through the barrier separating brands from their consumers.

Now it is possible to source brilliant ideas from your customers such as Pepsi Refresh and GE Ecomagination, or to tailor your marketing in real-time to reflect input from your customers. The Old Spice Man is a classic case in point of how much more engaging the conversation becomes if you give your customers a voice.

Rule 5: Entertainment

Passion Pointers by Tom Gladstone

Sport has a particular ability to evoke strong emotions through its personal stories of courage, inspiration and determination; through its inherent unpredictability, excitement and drama. Those emotions are an essential component of successful sponsorship – and are as relevant across other sponsorship platforms (music, film, fashion, art) as they are in sport. Harness the emotions correctly, and your consumers will add the catalyst of conversation.

But while simply being visible within a passion point might increase the chances of getting noticed, it doesn’t win a place in consumers’ hearts. There has to be active emotional involvement, not just proximity or presence — engagement not impressions. Whether brands capitalise on moments of high emotion or they tap into the core emotional sensibility of the passion point, anchored in anticipation, pride, patriotism, celebration, or even pain, they all need to exhibit genuine empathy and understanding.

This rule is articulated nicely by Mark Harrison, Chair of the Canadian Sponsorship Forum: ‘You can’t manufacture emotion. It’s already there. When you find it – just find a way to trigger it; tap into it; fuel it; and watch it grow into something remarkable.’

Using ABCDE

 

ABCDE is not a menu, where you can choose one or two elements to focus on. Rather, a great sponsorship programme will deliver against all the rules of the 4th Era.

Obviously, this framework isn’t rocket science, but at Synergy, we have found it to be incredibly useful as we advise our clients at every point of the sponsorship process.  We use it not only as a kind of checklist to diagnose where we are strong and where we need to work harder but also to ensure that all elements of the sponsorship programme - from creating the strategy and identifying the right assets right through to the activation – deliver the ABCDE.  So, before signing off, here are a few ways that it can be used to make your sponsorship programmes even more powerful:

1. Articulate specifically how you are using sponsorship to deliver all elements of ABCDE. Sponsorship strategies should use deep audience insight and a clear understanding of the business and brand to ensure that you are using sponsorship as effectively as possible in the 4th Era

2. When making the decision to acquire a new sponsorship asset, make sure that there is a concrete plan in place to deliver the ABCDE. Use it as part of the screening process and answer questions like: “What gives my brand authenticity in this space? How can I build or acquire authenticity?”  “What is the higher purpose of the sponsorship?  How are we adding value?”

3. When creating activation plans, be specific about which elements of ABCDE you need to focus on and how you will be able to deliver them.  For example: “How can we stimulate dialogue amongst our audience?  What role should our brand play in that conversation”

4. Factor ABCDE into your measurement. Create specific targets around each element and evaluate your success at achieving them.  Where do you have to work harder?

© Synergy Sponsorship a trading division of Engine Partners UK LLP 2011.  All rights reserved

By Carsten Thode on September 1st, 2011

Tags: Advertising, Brand marketing, Branded content, Communications, community, Consultancy, Content, Default, Design, Digital marketing, Event management consultants, Event management service, Experiential marketing, Food & Drink, Football Sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship consultants, Sales promotion, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy, Sponsorship consultants, Sport, Synergy, Synergy Loves, Synopsis, Twitter, Viral Marketing

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D is for Dialogue

Our relationships are all built on dialogue.  Talking to each other, sharing ideas, working together, creating things, discovering  new stuff,  having fun, laughing, crying, flirting, arguing – everything that makes life worth living is built on our ability to actively engage with each other.   Why should that be different from the relationships we build with the brands in our lives?

For most of its history, Marketing has been pretty much a one-way conversation – a kind of Orwellian 1984 scenario where brands tell you what they want you to know and the customer has no way of talking back (something Apple seemed to pick up on in their famous ad).  Of course, that was primarily driven by the available marketing channels which didn’t give customers a voice.

But like the hammer in the Apple ad, the digital age, and particularly the social media age (rather than the Apple Macintosh), has smashed through the barrier separating brands from their consumers.  And this starts to give us some fantastic examples of how brands are using these two-way channels to form deeper and more natural relationships with their customers.

Of course, there are lots of different roles for brands to play when fuelling this dialogue.  They can engage directly with their clients, but they can also fuel the dialogue in more subtle ways by becoming an integral part of their customers’ own conversations.  Either way, the principle is the same: give your customers a voice and enable them to have conversations with you and with each other.

Dialogue between your brand and the customer

There are many examples of brands engaging directly with their consumers.  One common form is around customer service.  Facebook and Twitter provide incredibly useful information about what customers really think about your brand.  Look for it, listen to it and do something about it.  When @interactiveamy’s pizza took over an hour to arrive, she vented her frustration on Twitter.  When the General Manager Raymon DeLeon saw her tweet, this was his response.  It’s a longish video – no need to watch the whole thing:

The famous Old Spice Man and Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” campaign are further examples of brands that respond to input from their customers with great results.  And, of course, Tippex gives you the chance to have loads of fun with their Bear in the Woods.

Crowdsourcing’ – actively soliciting ideas from you customers and doing something with them – is another form of dialogue which works for more than just funny marketing campaigns.

General Electric Ecomagination is an open call to businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators and students to submit breakthrough ideas for energy creation, management and use.  In addition to providing the ideas, the public also vote for their favourites.  With a pledge to invest $200m along with GE’s technical expertise to bring the best ideas to market, this is one form of dialogue that could literally change the world.

Pepsi are doing something very similar with their Pepsi Refresh project.  They are looking for ideas that will ‘Refresh the World’ with a similar commitment to funding the ideas that get the most votes from their consumers.

What is particularly strong about the Pepsi Refresh programme is how deep the conversations they facilitate flow. Not only have they created a powerful platform from which consumers can interact with the brand, the strength of the programme itself encourages consumers to build meaningful conversations with each other online, which grow into ‘real-world’ conversations (as individuals look to build momentum behind their own proposed initiatives), which culminates in a tangible legacy in an American community that consumers will talk about for years to come.

In a final example of engaging directly with your customers, Puma have just launched this Facebook App, which allows Spurs fans to play around with the design of their team’s 2011/2012 kit.  Of course, it would be even better if the fans had some input into the final design of the kit rather than simply “guessing the design” – but surely that won’t be too far away.  In fact, given the passion that football fans have for their team’s kit, and the ease with which they can speak to their fans, it is amazing that all kit manufacturers don’t get some form of fan input.  Here’s what happens if you don’t: http://bit.ly/mzWVT3.

Inserting your brand into your customers conversations

In addition to speaking directly to customers, brands can get their customers to talk about them by giving them the content or platform to fuel the conversation.

How did a Turkish Mobile Network get mentioned in 56,750 tweets (topping the Turkish trending tables for 8 days), which reached approximately 3.6 million people (in an initiative that probably cost them less than £20,000)?  Find out here.

Staying with mobile networks, Orange has also done a great job of creating a reason for fans to mention them.  In this example, which works particularly well on the back of their film sponsorships, Orange will make sure that your tweets are read out in the style of a film voiceover.  Go on, tweet your plans for this summer here.  And then of course, share it with all your friends and followers, who will receive the Orange branding.

Guinness FanFinder used a similar technique during their sponsorship of the RBS 6 Nations.  They published a massive picture of the crowd at various matches and encouraged people to find and tag themselves and their friends. With over 5,000 snap shots posted to walls via the Facebook App and an average of 130 Facebook friends per person that’s some more pretty good exposure for Guinness.

In an attempt to encourage dialogue around their new album, the Kaiser Chiefs kicked off a “create your own Kaiser Chiefs album” campaign for their latest album, The Future Is Medieval. Music fans get to pick out 10 songs from 20 of Kaiser Chiefs songs listed online, create their own album cover, buy it and then sell it online. To make it even better, for every sale of their album they will receive £1. Whilst socially engaging this campaign also pushes power onto the consumer removing them from their traditional role of purchasing products into the role of producer, giving them the chance to create their own product and sell it on to others. Thus creating a tangible benefit for the consumer for positive dialogue about the Kaiser Chiefs brand.

Finally, in a brilliant piece of work by our sister agency Jam, Samsung added considerable spice to the dialogue between tech bloggers and their audience via their “Extreme Unboxing” series of videos.

In all of these examples, the brands found an authentic role for themselves and encouraged conversations between communities with a common interest.

Where does sponsorship fit in to all this

So what does this all mean for sponsorship?  The answer is simple: passion.  People want to talk about the things that they really care about.  With all due respect to most brands, your customers are unlikely to care as much about you as they are do about sports, music, film, art, technology, the environment or activity in their community (to name but a few).  So, if you want to start a conversation with your customers, talking about something that they are really interested in is a good place to start.  And finding a shared passion with your customers is, of course, at the very heart of what sponsorship is all about.

In many ways, this blog goes hand in hand with the brilliant piece on Content written by Ben in last month’s Synopsis (definitely read it if you haven’t already) because the key to stimulating this dialogue is great content.  But, what I hope this blog makes clear is that creating great content and putting it in the right places is not enough.  It is then all about opening up the channels and fuelling the conversations that make life so interesting.

Principles of Dialogue

  1. Listen to your customers, learn what they care about and value their contribution.  Actively open up two way communication channels
  2. Find an authentic role for your brand (a reason for you to be there) and don’t overstep your bounds
  3. Think about whether it makes more sense to talk with your audience directly or to get them to talk about you
  4. Remember, this is about your shared passion – not about you
  5. Have fun and be creative – remember engaging with other people is what makes life fun

By Carsten Thode on June 17th, 2011

Tags: Branded content, Communications, community, Content, Facebook, Media, Mobile, Music, Public relations, Social Media, Sponsorship, Synergy, Synopsis, Television audiences, Twitter, Viral Marketing, YouTube

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Moneyball: Why Andy Carroll might be worth £35m

The Twittersphere was buzzing yesterday, and the question everyone was asking was: how can Andy Carroll be worth £35m? The general consensus was that he wasn’t worth that amount of money and that the footballing world had gone crazy.

Maybe the conventional wisdom is correct. But one thing “Moneyball” (in my opinion the best Sports Business book ever written) taught us is to ignore conventional wisdom. Moneyball is about the Oakland A’s baseball team and their General Manager Billy Beane and is currently being turned into a Brad Pitt/Philip Seymour Hoffman movie, due for release later this year:

The basic premise is this: In 2002, the Oakland A’s had the second smallest budget in baseball (around $40m) – less than a quarter of the New York Yankees ($126m). But for the previous 3 years, they had consistently been one of the top four teams (though they hadn’t won a World Series). That is the equivalent of Wolves qualifying for the Champions League for 3 years in a row on their current budget (the A’s didn’t increase their relative budget as a result of their success in the first two years).

The secret to the A’s success was to completely re-think the way they evaluated players. Using a new set of statistical analyses (called Sabermetrics) and throwing out all conventional wisdom, they were able to see that the market for players was hugely inefficient. Some player attributes were highly overrated in terms of their correlation with success, while others were highly undervalued. So the key to running a successful team on a budget was simple:

sell those players who have overrated attributes (for lots of money) and buy players who have the underrated attributes (for much less)

So why is this all relevant for Liverpool and Andy Carroll?

Well first and foremost, John W Henry, the new owner of Liverpool is a convert to Sabermetrics. Many of the techniques used in Sabermetrics came from the financial markets, which is Henry’s background. And when Henry bought the Boston Red Sox in 2003, his first move was to offer Billy Beane a job for a guaranteed $12.5m over 5 years (which he turned down). Nevertheless, he installed Sabermetrics at the Red Sox, who then went on to win multiple World Series.

Red Sox 2007

So Liverpool is now a Sabermetric club with the best brains in the business analysing players’ value. Would they really pay £35m for a player if they didn’t see the value?

And what did that analysis look like?

Success in football is defined by winning points. Given the financial rewards at stake (eg. qualifying for the Champions League), it is relatively easy to calculate the value of each Premier League point. And if points are the asset, then goals are the currency. To quote from Moneyball:

“Before the 2002 season, Paul DePodesta (the A’s sabermatrician) had reduced the coming six months to a maths problem. He judged how many wins it would take to get into the play-offs: 95. He then calculated how many more runs the Oakland A’s would need to score than they allowed to win 95 games: 135. (the idea that there was a stable relationship between season run totals and season wins was another Jamesean (the father of Sabermetrics) discovery)”

It is possible to determine how many goals you need to score in order to acquire your targeted number of points. And therefore, each goal has a value. Before we have any Ossie Ardiles and Kevin Keegan arguments about teams who score lots of goals but don’t necessarily win points, here are the facts:

1) Currently, the top 4 teams in the table are the four teams who have scored the most goals

2) In the seasons 2006/2007, 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 the top four teams in the table were also the teams who scored the most goals

3) The only exception to this rule in the recent past is last season, where Manchester City, who finished 5th, scored more goals than Tottenham, who finished 4th

So, each goal that Carroll contributes can be valued in terms of ‘acquiring’ points.

But how do we determine how many goals he is likely to contribute?

One of the cleverest bits of analysis discussed in Moneyball is the disentangling of the link between what actually happens on the pitch and what is expected to happen. To quote again:

“Any ball hit any place on a baseball field had been hit just that way thousands of times before: the average of all those hits was the Platonic Idea (of an average run value). Call it a line drive that is hit at x trajectory and y speed to point #968. From 10 years worth of data, you can see that there have been 8,642 practically identical hits. You can see that 92% of the time the hit went for a double, 4% for a single and 4% it was caught. Suppose the average value of that event is .50 of a run scored. No matter what actually happened, the system credits the hitter with having generated .50 of a run…”

So let’s apply that to football and Andy Carroll.

The first thing we do is to forget the number of goals he scores and the number of assists he makes (what actually happened) and concentrate on the expected value of his actions on the pitch.

Here are a few examples (by the way, these are all completely made up assumptions but it wouldn’t be too difficult to calculate them):

1) A penalty is scored 79% of the time. Every penalty he wins is worth .79 of a goal (regardless of whether he takes it or even whether it is scored)

2) A goal results from a corner kick 4% of the time. Every corner kick he wins is worth .04 of a goal

3) Divide the pitch up into sectors and calculate the percentage of time a goal is scored from a free kick taken from that sector. If a goal is scored 7% of the time a free kick is taken from sector 4, then every free kick Carroll wins in sector 4 is worth .07 of a goal (and the same for all the other sectors on the pitch)

4) Divide up the goal into 6 sectors (top left, top middle, top right, bottom left, bottom middle and bottom right) and calculate the expected goal value of a shot on target in each of those sectors. If 46% of shots into the top left sector are goals, then award him .46 of a goal for every shot he hits into that sector

5) A successful pass within the opponent’s penalty area results in a goal 8% of the time. Every successful pass he makes in the penalty area gets .08 of a goal

6) Winning a header in the opponents penalty area results in a goal 5% of the time. He is awarded .05 of a goal whenever he wins a header in the opponents area

…and so on

andy carroll header

    From this type of analysis, we can calculate the expected number of goals Carroll will contribute to Liverpool and we will also know the value of each goal.  If that is more than £35m over the course of his contract, then it could represent great value.

    Of course, this has been simplified a little bit. The real analysis is the ‘marginal’ impact of Carroll compared to another striker. In other words, how many more goals would he be responsible for than another striker?

    And this is where the idea of undervalued attributes comes into play. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that “winning headers in the opponent’s penalty area” is worth more in terms of expected goals than people give it credit for. If Carroll is the “Greek God” of winning headers in the opponent’s penalty area, then he is worth much more than people think he is.

    Would we really be surprised if John W Henry’s Sabermatricians have been doing this type of analysis since they bought Liverpool? Maybe they have just sold a player for £50m who has ‘overrated attributes’ and bought one who, even at £35m, is undervalued.

    By Carsten Thode on February 1st, 2011

    Tags: Barclays Premier League, Brand marketing, Consultancy, Default, Football, Football Sponsorship, Newcastle United, Public relations

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    Debt in Football – Is It All Bad?

    There is a saying: “If you’re £1m in debt, you’re in trouble.  If you’re £100m in debt, your bank is in trouble.”  In which case, both Arsenal and their Bond Holders, to whom Arsenal owe a total of £266m*, are in double trouble.

    But can debt in a football club ever be a good thing?  What about all these high profile fan revolts, Premier League clubs going into administration and UEFA deeming it necessary to introduce Financial Fair Play regulations to safeguard the future of the game?

    Well, in Arsenal’s case, the answer is “Yes”. Of course, having ‘good debt’ hasn’t brought them a trophy in the last five years – and it didn’t help in the game at home to West Brom, but it is worth contrasting Arsenal’s situation with the other high-profile debt stories in football.

    Firstly, debt is not a bad thing, per se.  In fact, it is a very good thing.  How many people could own a house if they had to pay for it all in cash?  Similarly, very few businesses have the cash they need to build a new factory, buy equipment, finance international expansion or conduct vital R&D.  They rely on debt to finance these activities – debt is the engine of growth. In Arsenal’s case, they needed the debt to finance the new stadium.  No debt, no new stadium.

    Of course, there are two very important conditions that need to be met.  Firstly, the debt must be used to finance an activity which generates returns over and above the total cost of that debt.  Secondly, the cash flow from the new activity needs to be secure, predictable and able to service the interest payments.

    Arsenal. In Arsenal’s case both conditions are met.  They have used the debt to build a new stadium which has significantly increased their revenues and profits.  To put it into context, the 9,000 premium seats at the Emirates generate more revenue per match than all 38,000 seats at Highbury did.  The remaining 51,000 seats at the Emirates are all upside.

    Matchday revenue (the gate receipts taken by the stadium) was £93m and the operating costs of the stadium were £55m – meaning that the stadium generated a profit of £38m.  Total interest payments were £20.2m, providing interest coverage of nearly two times.

    These ‘Stadium Profits’ are secure and predictable.  As long as Arsenal play roughly the same number of games per year and have roughly the same attendance, then there will never be a problem paying the interest.  The Stadium pays for itself and doesn’t rely on subsidies from broadcast revenue, commercial revenue or player trading surpluses.  It is the very definition of a good investment.

    Good debt: Arsenal borrowed money to build a stadium which has increased the clubs value. The increased cash flow generated by the asset can comfortably finance the debt

    Manchester United. The debt was not taken out in order to finance an activity that would increase the club’s value – it was taken out to buy the club itself.  So there is no reason to think that United’s financial performance is any better as a result of taking out the debt (in other words, the debt and the interest payments are pointless).  Secondly, the level of their debt (over £700m) is such that it cannot be financed by matchday profits alone – they have to tap into broadcast revenues, commercial income and player trading surpluses.  Last year, without the profits from the sale of Cristiano Ronaldo for £80m, they would have made a loss.  And that is a problem.

    Pointless Debt: Debt was not used to build or acquire an asset that increases Manchester United’s value. Debt re-payments cannot be met by a sustainable and predictable source of cash flow

    Liverpool: This is a very similar situation to Manchester United.  Again, the £350m of debt wasn’t used to finance growth but simply to buy the club (another case of pointless debt and interest payments).  Last year they didn’t generate enough profit from all their activities to cover their interest payments and recorded losses of £55m.  Big problem.

    Leeds United and Portsmouth: Both of these clubs used debt to finance the purchase of players in the form of transfer fees and wages.  It is pretty easy to see why this was a disastrous policy.  Players don’t directly generate increased cash flow and their value is unpredictable and variable.  If the new players had caused a significant improvement in the team’s performance which had led to increased revenue and the value of the players themselves had increased, then the gamble might have paid off.  But it took very little for the house of cards to come tumbling down.

    Chelsea and Manchester City: These two clubs also borrowed money to finance the purchase of players.  Of course, this money was borrowed from a Sugar Daddy rather than a bank and it is unlikely that any interest will be paid, let alone the principal.  Who knows what the long term consequences of this ‘Financial Doping’ model will be, but it is far from certain that it will end well.

    In summary, Arsenal’s finances since they moved to the Emirates aren’t the problem.  The problem is that they haven’t added to their trophy cabinet.

    * Arsenal also have £127.6m in cash, making their Net Debt the widely reported £138.4m.  Incidentally, a further benefit of debt is that interest payments are tax deductible – so 28% (the corporation tax rate) of any interest payment is re-captured in the form of tax savings.  This is one of the reasons why Arsenal are in no hurry to use their surplus cash to pay down their debt.

    By Carsten Thode on September 28th, 2010

    Tags: Barclays Premier League, Default, Football, Football Sponsorship, Manchester United, Naming Rights

    2 comments


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