The Premier League’s first sponsors: Beer, photocopiers, timber and more photocopiers

The Premier League is now a giant global industry, with some of the world’s biggest companies bidding against each other to sponsor club shirts and appear on screens around the world.

But when the league was formed in 1992, 30 years ago this week, football was a more domestic affair and sponsorship deals were less beneficial – one of the clubs back then didn’t even bother to have a sponsor.

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire, who hosts the Price of Football podcast, says total commercial income in the Premier League – encompassing far more than just shirt sponsorship – was £67million ($81.8m) in 1992-93.

The last year for which figures are available was 2020/21, when the amount was £1.6billion. Even factoring in inflation, the money is about 10 times more now.

Another trend to note is that while modern clubs face criticism for promoting controversial industries like online gambling and cryptocurrency, in the early 1990s, sponsors were mainly local firms, alcohol and electronics.

“They were the type of goods British consumers were interested in and consumed,” explains Simon Chadwick, Global Professor at Sport at Lyon Business School. “They are evidence of how we lived our lives then.”

For him, 1992 is an intriguing moment in time because the Cold War had been won and capitalism was established as the world’s prevailing order, but English football was still fairly inward-facing.

That was all changing with the new domestic competition and the rebranded Champions League, which also started that year.

“Gradually, life changed, free trade began to prosper and markets like China began to open up,” he explains.  “Football began to reflect some bigger changes globally.”

The Athletic has spoken to some of those involved in deals at that time, as well as experts, to tell the story — via every club’s sponsorship deal in the first year of the Premier League — of how football changed…

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Arsenal – JVC

JVC sponsored the club for 18 years until 1999. Phil Carling, Arsenal’s head of marketing between 1989 and 1996, remembers how the club first struck a deal with the Japanese electronics firm, or rather how they struck a deal with the UK licencee for the firm, back in 1981.

“He was quite a wealthy guy who was also an Arsenal fan,” Carling tells The Athletic. “That was the genesis of the deal.”

JVC initially made phonographs, then televisions, and by the 1980s they specialised in VHS players and recording equipment, taking advantage of the home-technology boom.

Carling says the deal was around £350,000 per year back in 1992 and was renewed soon after for £50,000 more. In comparison, the club’s current deal with Fly Emirates was worth a reported £40million a year when last renewed in 2018, a partnership that also includes stadium naming rights.

Carling acknowledges the numbers in 1992 seem “quite pitiful” compared to the modern day.

“At that time we did have a counterbid, but that was from Budweiser,” he says. “They actually bid more money, but the board turned it down.”

The Arsenal hierarchy thought it was a bad look to be sponsored by an alcohol brand, though that didn’t put off many of their rivals, when the game was run in a much more casual fashion.

“The valuations those days were generally done by the chairmen of the clubs boasting to each other about how much they were getting,” says Carling. “Now the sponsor wants to know what the data and analytics are that underlie the investment decision because it can be quite a significant proportion of a firm’s marketing budget.”

Aston Villa – Mita Copiers

Aston Villa won the league in 1981 and became champions of Europe in 1982, but success quickly dried up.

This meant at the start of the 1989-1990 season, there was no silverware to include as the team assembled for its traditional group photo.

Instead, Graham Taylor’s men posed with two large photocopiers made by Mita, the club’s Japanese sponsor for nearly a decade between 1984 and 1993.

“Japan in 1992 was the world’s biggest innovator in electronic and digital goods,” says Simon Chadwick. “It wasn’t until 1995 or 1996 that the economic problems began to bite.”

The company was hit hard by Japan’s “Lost Decade” and was eventually bought up by Kyocera in the first month of the new millennium.

Though the Mita brand is no more, Kyocera has also made its mark on English football, sponsoring the shirts of Reading FC for three seasons including 2005-6, when the Berkshire club broke the record for the highest points total in a professional English league by topping the Championship with 106 points.

Blackburn Rovers – McEwan’s Lager

Blackburn Rovers’ greatest moment came in 1995 when the club won the Premier League, a remarkable achievement given the town’s tiny population.

Those iconic blue-and-white shirts were adorned with the logo of McEwan’s Lager, a beer brand headquartered in Edinburgh.

There were several beer companies on Premier League shirts when it all began, but none in recent years, although many clubs have deals other than shirt sponsorship with alcohol brands.

There is no outright ban on alcohol advertising on shirts, but a voluntary code of practice means clubs do not include them on children’s replica shirts, and it brings other complications.

“There are reservations because there are certain geographical markets where alcohol is disapproved of, and clubs don’t want to put themselves into an awkward position,” says Kieran Maguire.

“Back in the early days, the league was far more domestic and the international audience was far less relevant,” he says, pointing out that for many years, the league effectively gave its international broadcast rights away for free.

Chelsea – Commodore International

Chelsea became one of the Premier League’s top sides after Roman Abramovich bought them in 2003, but in the Premier League’s inaugural season, the club depended on income from consumer electronics.

There were multiple consumer electronics firms on shirts in the Premier League’s first season. At Chelsea, it was Commodore, founded as a typewriter firm in 1950s New York before moving into the electronic calculator market and eventually personal computers.

Their biggest success was the Commodore 64, released in 1982, which is listed as the best-selling single computer model of all time in the Guinness Book of Records.

The firm began sponsoring Chelsea in 1987 shortly after the release of its Amiga range, which failed to be as successful as the 64 — the industry had moved on to Microsoft Windows running on Intel computers.

Commodore announced its voluntary liquidation as the 1993-94 season drew to a close, prompting Chelsea to find a new sponsor — Coors beer.

Coventry City – Peugeot

Coventry have fallen on hard times of late but spent 37 years in the top flight between 1967 and 2001.

Their sponsor for the first few years in the newly rebranded division, Peugeot is a nod to the once close links between English football teams and industry.

The French car firm had a plant in Coventry for six decades, before it closed in 2006 — operations were moved to Slovakia where things could be done more cheaply.

Peugeot was replaced by Subaru and partner Isuzu until 2005, while the club’s stadium, built in 2005, was named the Ricoh Arena for a period, another Japanese electronics company to add to the list.

Crystal Palace – Tulip Computers

Palace’s most exciting spell in history, which included a third-place finish in the top flight and an FA Cup final, came just before the formation of the Premier League.

Fly Virgin, now rebranded as Virgin Atlantic, was on the shirts in those glory years.

By the time the new league was founded, Palace’s sponsor was a brand less familiar to modern eyes: Tulip, a Dutch personal computer manufacturer.

Tulip was hit hard by the global financial crisis and filed for bankruptcy in 2009, shortly after changing their name to Nedfield.

Although Tulip Computers can still be spotted on the shirts of nostalgic fans at Selhurst Park, the deal made less of a lasting impression in the Netherlands.

Mark Elbertse, the final CEO of Tulip/Nedfield, who joined a decade after the Palace deal ended in 1993, told The Athletic: “I was not even aware of this sponsorship.”

Everton – NEC

The dominance of Japanese electronics firms continues. Founded at the end of the 19th century, NEC initially made telephones and then radio equipment.

By the time they sponsored Everton, they had rebranded from the Nippon Electronic Company to NEC and made personal computers as well as VHS players, printers and mobile phones.

In 1992, the British economy was “on the cusp of a digital explosion”, explains Simon Chadwick, with devices becoming affordable enough to be bought for homes and most offices.

Everton fans will remember the logo fondly — the period from 1985 to 1995 was very successful for the club, with Everton’s last top-flight title coming in an NEC shirt in 1987.

The NEC sponsorship ended with a 1-0 win over Manchester United in the 1995 FA Cup final.

Since then, Everton have not won a trophy.

Ipswich – Fisons

Ipswich Town were sponsored by pharmaceutical and chemicals company Fisons from 1986 to 1995.

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire notes that this is an example of something that has virtually vanished from the top flight but used to be very common — a shirt sponsor with a close local link.

“You see those links in League One and League Two but not really in the Premier League,” he told The Athletic.

For example, in this year’s fourth tier, Barrow are sponsored by a local accountancy firm and Gillingham are sponsored by a local power generation firm.

Fisons grew out of an artificial fertiliser business built by Edward Packard in the 19th century. By the time the firm sponsored Ipswich Town, they had diversified into pharmaceuticals.

It was eventually bought by a French firm which, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, became Sanofi, a pharmaceutical giant based in Paris.

Leeds – Admiral

Admiral Sportswear, founded in Leicester in 1914, originally made clothing for the armed forces before branching out to sport, especially cricket. Their relationship with Leeds goes back to the 1970s.

The company’s CEO back then was Bert Patrick, who thought fans might want to buy and wear the same shirts as their heroes, so he arranged a meeting with Leeds manager Don Revie and struck a deal for the brand to be slapped on the club’s yellow away kit, according to Patrick’s obituary in The Times last year.

He also signed deals with teams like Manchester United and England, but the company fell on hard times in the 1980s, with manufacturing competition from Asia and clubs switching to brands like Umbro and Adidas.

But the brand has periodically relaunched and, after Leeds won the last-ever First Division season in 1991-1992, Admiral negotiated a deal to sponsor their shirts for the inaugural campaign of the new competition.

The club briefly appeared on the famous white shirts again as the kit manufacturer in the mid-2000s.

Liverpool – Carlsberg

While some clubs seem to chop and change their shirt sponsor every season, Liverpool have had just two since the formation of the Premier League.

They recently announced that a deal with sponsors Standard Chartered bank would be extended to 2027, which will make for 17 seasons. That will equal the length of time the club’s shirt was sponsored by Carlsberg, which replaced Candy electronics for the Premier League’s inaugural season.

The relationship between Carlsberg and Liverpool has always been tight. In the late 2000s, the club considered a move to a new stadium that would have been named “Carlsberg Anfield” in exchange for cash.

The move never happened. Instead, the club was bought by Fenway Sports Group, who chose to expand Anfield rather than replace it. Carlsberg is still a club sponsor, though no longer appears on the shirts.

As Liverpool became a global brand, an alcohol sponsor would be a more “sensitive” issue, says Simon Chadwick.

“Socially undesirable sponsors,” is the term he says is used in football circles.

Manchester City – Brother

Brother sponsored Manchester City from 1987 until 1999 and, at the time the Premier League started, City were one of the top sides, coming off the back of two successive fifth-place finishes.

The company is another Japanese electronics manufacturer, making printers, desktop computers, fax machines, machine tools and photocopiers, which have a curiously large role in the history of English football.

The Brother sponsorship wasn’t the first time City made a deal involving photocopiers. Back in 1978, they signed Kazimierz Deyna, a Polish international who became one of the first foreign players to come to England.

City signed him from Polish army team Legia Warsaw, who eschewed a conventional transfer fee in favour of goods that were hard to come by in communist Poland, like medical equipment — and photocopiers.

Manchester United – Sharp

Yet another Japanese electronics company, Sharp’s relationship with Manchester United was one of the longest in English football, spanning from 1982 to 2000.

Like Aston Villa, the squad once posed with some gear including, by the looks of things, a photocopier.

Classic squad photo: Anybody want to buy some electronics? Sharp were #mufc‘s first shirt sponsor, back in 1982. pic.twitter.com/vLSvAUakl0

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) September 26, 2013

It was a good deal for Sharp. Sir Alex Ferguson’s side won the inaugural Premier League in 1993 and a remarkable seven of the first nine competitions, becoming the biggest sports brand in the world.

Sharp will forever be associated with the club’s sensational last-minute victory over Bayern Munich to win the Champions League in 1999, a year before the firm was replaced by Vodafone.

Winger Lee Sharpe also played for United in the early Premier League years, leading to the unusual situation of a player’s name appearing on the front and back of a shirt (albeit spelled differently).

(Ian Walker joined Leicester City just after the club dropped local crisp manufacturer Walker’s as a sponsor.)

Middlesbrough – ICI

Back on the theme of domestic companies, Kieran Maguire says: “If we take a look at the Premier League now, it is a global product, but football was a tainted product in 1992-93. We were in that post-Hillsborough mess and there wasn’t that same global interest or feel-good factor.”

That made it far more likely that clubs would pair up with a local firm, perhaps through informal connections rather than a formal bidding process.

ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) was no minnow, though, being one of the biggest companies in Britain after being formed from four merging chemical companies in 1926.

When it first appeared on Middlesbrough’s red shirts in the early 1990s, it had interests ranging from food additives to pharmaceuticals. With major chemical plants on Teesside, it was a familiar brand.

The club, now in England’s second tier, are owned by Steve Gibson, who made his fortune transporting bulk liquids, powders and gases, working closely with the region’s chemical companies.

Norwich – Norwich and Peterborough

In the Premier League’s inaugural season, there were just three places in European competition up for grabs.

The Champions League spot went to winners Manchester United. One UEFA Cup spot went to Aston Villa, who came second.

The other went to third-placed Norwich City, who had been tipped for relegation before the season began but led the league by several points in December, then fell away over the Christmas period.

The club’s garish shirts that season — still popular among fans keen to remember the club’s highest-ever league finish — were sponsored by the Norwich and Peterborough Building Society.

Norwich and Peterborough eventually merged with the Yorkshire Building Society, the trading name above branches that still exist in Norwich and beyond.

Nottingham Forest – Shipstones, Labatt’s

From 1987 to 1993, Forest were sponsored by Shipstones, a local brewery, and for most of the side’s home games in 1992-93, the shirts featured the logo of the drink known as “Shippo’s” by locals.

But in an early hint at the Premier League’s bending to the power of television, while all Forest replica shirts had the Shipstones logo, when the club played on TV it generally carried the name Labatt’s.

Labatt’s is a Canadian brand of beer that was the parent company of Shipstones. Labatt’s eventually took over the shirt sponsorship properly from 1993 to 1997, as clubs’ marketing potential became apparent.

The beer market has become more and more consolidated over the years, and Labatt’s is now part of AB InBev, a huge conglomerate based in Belgium with brands like Corona and Budweiser, which sponsors the World Cup.

Shipstones fell into decline and the brewery moved from Nottingham to Burton-upon-Trent, but has recently been revived amid the trend for local products on a smaller scale.

Oldham Athletic – JD Sports

Of the 50 clubs to have played in the Premier League over the past 30 seasons, only one has dropped out of the football league — Oldham, who were relegated this year.

Their shirt sponsor from back then has fared better. JD Sports went global, surviving economic turbulence and changing consumer habits, while other high-street brands have gone to the wall.

The firm was established in nearby Bury in 1981, initially expanding across Greater Manchester before making its mark in shopping centres and cities across the UK and beyond.

In 2021, the company reported 850 stores around the world, while the JD Group, one of the FTSE 100 largest companies in the UK, has over 1,700 other stores, such as Blacks and FootAsylum.

QPR – Classic FM

The playlist on Classic FM may be centuries old, but the classical music radio station is almost exactly the same age as the Premier League.

The 1990 Broadcasting Act deregulated the UK broadcasting sector, including creating licences for three new national radio stations operating on a commercial basis.

Classic FM won one of the slots and pitched itself as a rival to BBC Radio 3.

The station’s first broadcast came on September 7, 1992, three weeks after the first Premier League kicked off.

As part of the publicity blitz, the new station sponsored QPR for one season. It was a lucky omen, the West London club surprising many by coming fifth with Les Ferdinand — now director of football — scoring 24 goals.

It wasn’t the last time a commercial radio station sponsored a London club in the Premier League – the following season Wimbledon were sponsored by LBC.

Sheffield United – Laver

Sheffield is known as the Steel City and United are The Blades, but the club’s shirt sponsor for a decade up to 1995 was in the wood business.

If you’re looking for a clear sign of English football’s economic and cultural shifts, you need look no further than Bramall Lane, still the location of the Laver timber company and the name of Sheffield United’s stadium.

Arnold Laver founded the firm in 1920. It now has 16 timber depots across the UK and is part of a larger group owned by Cairngorm Capital, a private equity firm.

A few years after the deal ended, United’s shirt sponsor became Desun, a Chinese company that makes powders to sell to fruit juice manufacturers.

“That move from local to global is symbolic of what happened in English football,” says Simon Chadwick.

Sheffield Wednesday – Sanderson

For the first eight seasons of the Premier League, Wednesday were sponsored by Sanderson, a local electronics and software firm.

The company’s chairman was local businessman Paul Thompson, who remembers the Premier League had already kicked off and Wednesday were one of the only teams without a sponsor.

“A friend of mine who was a solicitor invited me to a match,” he says. “He had a table in a lounge and some seats for the game and said, ‘I can’t get anyone else to come’.”

Wednesday’s lack of sponsor was a talking point at the game, so Thompson asked what it would cost and mulled it over at the weekend.

On Monday, he rang the club to strike a deal worth £150,000 to sponsor Wednesday in their first Premier League season. It was renegotiated various times until 2000, when the company was taken over by a venture capital group that chose to end the deal. Wednesday were relegated that year, never to return.

Thompson recalls a fellow board member with no interest in football was not persuaded, but went to his local badminton club and asked some friends if they had heard of other shirt sponsors in football.

“Everyone knew them, Liverpool and Carlsberg, Sharp and Man United. He came back and said ‘let’s do it’.”

Southampton – Draper Tools

Thompson’s company also sponsored Southampton from 1995 to 1999, which meant that for four years there were two Premier League clubs sponsored by Sanderson.

“It was very good for us because we did a lot of cold-calling to businesses to try to sell our software to them,” Thompson recalls. “It was hard to get through to the right people.”

“If you can phone up and say, ‘We’re Sanderson, we sponsor Sheffield Wednesday and Southampton’, it gave you an in and something to talk about.”

When the Premier League started, however, the south coast club were sponsored by local firm Draper Tools, which was founded in 1919 and moved to Hampshire in the 1960s.

The company sponsored Southampton between 1984 and 1993 and the brand was worn by players including Matt Le Tissier and Alan Shearer.

Draper is still a Hampshire-based wholesaler, selling automotive and DIY tools to stockists around the country.

Tottenham – Holsten

In 1983, Tottenham were listed on the London Stock Exchange and within weeks their white shirts were emblazoned with Holsten.

Spurs won the 1984 UEFA Cup carrying the German brewer’s name and kept it there until 1995, before another deal running from 1999 to 2002.

Tottenham’s current sponsor, Hong Kong-based insurance giant AIA, is an example of how football sponsorship has become more “collaborative and strategic” in recent years, explains Simon Chadwick.

“Tottenham have deliberately targeted the East Asian market and AIA has been part of that,” he says.

This year, the club also toured South Korea, home of star forward Son Heung-min, and Spurs have a huge following in the country. An interesting commercial question for Spurs is whether they can retain those fans and the commercial benefit they bring when last year’s Premier League Golden Boot winner moves club or retires.

Wimbledon – No sponsor

While Sheffield Wednesday started the 1992-93 without a shirt sponsor, Wimbledon went the whole season without one.

Although this seems highly unusual to modern viewers, Simon Chadwick points out that shirt sponsors were relatively new and the money far less, so it wasn’t deemed vital.

“Back in the day, it was a nice added extra,” he says. “It wasn’t seen as being essential to the financial sustainability of the club. These days, in terms of Financial Fair Play, player wages and transfer fees, they make an important contribution.”

Famously, Barcelona wore unsponsored kits until 2006, when the Unicef logo first appeared, a charitable arrangement rather than a revenue-raiser.

But Qatar Airways, Rakuten electronics and now music streaming service Spotify have since pumped serious money into the club in return for adding their logo to the famous red and blue shirts.

Simon Chadwick believes football sponsorship is only going to head further in the direction of more globalisation and increasingly large piles of cash.

“Many American investors believe Premier League football clubs are underselling themselves and their sponsorship assets are worth far more money than they’re currently asking for,” he says.

(Lead graphic: Sam Richardson)