June 13 – LaLiga champions Barcelona have ended a 16-year merchandising rights deal with Nike to form a new company which will manage the club’s retail, licensing and merchandising activity.
June 12 – Tottenham Hotspur have signed a new long-term agreement with hotels booking website Hotels.com that will include preferential discounts for Spurs signed up to the website’s loyalty programme.
June 12 – Portuguese technology company Primetag has launched a social media ranking tool ahead of the Russia 2018 World Cup that provides up-to-the-minute aggregated data from the Instagram accounts of players, coaches and teams with the purpose of measuring influence.
June 12 – On-line trading broker AvaTrade has expanded its regional sponsorship partnership with Manchester City into a global partnership in a new multi-year deal.
By Paul Nicholson
June 7 – The final Premier League TV rights packages for the UK have been awarded with Amazon swooping in with a groundbreaking deal that breaks Sky and BT’s grip on the broadcast of live games in the UK.
June 5 – For millions of football fans all over the world the World Cup is not the World Cup without the official sticker album, particularly in the UK where a World Cup without the player swaps merry-go-round would be like Christmas without a fat man in a red suit coming down the chimney.
June 6 – West Ham have signed Taiwanese international airline Eva Air as the club’s first official airline partner.
June 4 – Mastercard and FIFA just don’t seem to get along. No longer the official credit card of the World Cup – that right belongs to Visa – a hijack marketing campaign by Mastercard fell flat on its face at the weekend.
June 3 – Championship club Aston Villa that lost in the £160 million play-off game for the Premier League against Fulham, has become first club in EFL to launch its own esports league – AVFC Gaming.
June 1 – The French Football Federation and Coca-Cola have agreed a five-year extension of their long-standing partnership taking them through to June 2023.
May 31 – The UEFA Europa League is getting a new look for next season that UEFA says will emphasise the “scale and dynamic nature of the competition.”
May 30 – Spain’s Mediapro has gatecrashed the TV rights party in France by snapping up key broadcast packages for Ligue 1 as total fees for the rights sale hit €1.15 billion. Canal Plus ended up with no rights in this round of bidding, in what is a major setback for the broadcaster.
May 30 – The Qatar-based beIN Media Group, the biggest sports broadcaster in the region, has urged FIFA to take legal action against what it called pirate broadcasters in Saudi Arabia ahead of the World Cup.
May 30 – Maltese-based bookmaker ManBetX has become LaLiga’s official betting partner for Asia in a multi-million Euro three-year deal that will begin with the new season this September.
May 29 – The Chinese are ramping up their engagement with the World Cup with Bull, a Chinese electrical devices provider, agreeing a deal with Tencent, for a series of eSports events and marketing campaigns throughout the country during the Russian tournament.