You know for sure that the people’s game has become gentrified when luxury Swiss watch brands start sponsoring football clubs.
Now, five and a half years after Hublot set the ball rolling by sponsoring Manchester United, another landmark deal has been unveiled.
Maurice Lacroix has announced a three-year agreement with Barcelona that will see it become the Catalán club’s Official Watch Partner in a deal said to be worth somewhere in the seven figures of euros (ie upwards of €1 million).
To be fair, Maurice Lacroix watches do not generally fall into the super luxury category. Managing director Marc Gläser tells me that prices start at around €500, a figure hardly beyond the reach of the dedicated Barça fan, although they can go up to €15-20,000.
But equally, selling quality timepieces to the Camp Nou faithful is not really the point of the deal, or only a small part of it anyway.
“You have to look at what FC Barcelona stands for,” Gläser says. “Highest quality, high excitement, passion, precision.” Having visited Camp Nou three times in the last three weeks, he says, he realised “the huge quality they have everywhere. Success is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of continuous high quality work.”
And quite apart from these mutually desirable attributes that the Barça brand is associated with, the team happens to be on telly rather a lot. “The key element for us is less maybe to sell directly to the fans, but increasing awareness for Maurice Lacroix,” Gläser says. “That is a key challenge we have.”
Hence, much as executives are poring over the designs of three watches that will comprise an FC Barcelona collection, the bit of the agreement dealing with Maurice Lacroix’s presence on the Camp Nou perimeter advertising boards is a critical ingredient in the partnership.
As Gläser explains, these boards will be the exclusive preserve of Maurice Lacroix during added time at the end of the first and second halves. Since these culminating moments will often include the game’s decisive action, the thinking is that they will frequently loom large in media coverage of the match.
Barcelona is not the watch brand’s first football deal. It already sponsors four big German clubs: Hertha Berlin, Bayer Leverkusen, Werder Bremen and VfL Wolfsburg.
Based on this experience, Gläser says the results are “stunning” and that the brand gets “much more back than what we paid”, both in terms of media exposure and increased business. Asked for an example, he says that sales in one well-known German store chain are up roughly 40% – an eye-catching figure, even if there may be other factors in play besides the football club sponsorships.
The thinking behind the Barcelona deal may also provide an insight into how the big European clubs are starting to derive tangible benefits from their extensive Asian followings, even if direct per capita revenue generated from Asia-based fans remains, as far as I can tell, pretty insignificant.
“Our priority is Asia,” Gläser tells me, explaining that Maurice Lacroix’s parent company, the business services group DKSH, does 90% of its SFr9 billion turnover there. A glance at the group’s website, indeed, reveals that its slogan appears to be, “Think Asia. Think DKSH.” Maurice Lacroix’s own biggest market, ahead of Germany, is Hong Kong and China.
The fact that a Swiss watch brand believes it can target this market via a partnership with a Spanish football club is an interesting manifestation of the globalisation of business. But it should also be immensely encouraging to the executives whose job it is to market the magic of top European football brands to prospective partners in all manner of fields from, I don’t know, cognac to credit cards.
“Five million people come each year to visit Camp Nou and most of them are Asians,” Gläser says. From August, when the handover of the new watches to Barcelona players is scheduled, it will be interesting to see how many of these visitors return home with tastefully FC Barcelona-branded Maurice Lacroix timepieces.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.