By Samindra Kunti
April 27 – Social media platform Twitter has broken into top tier football rights territory with the live-streamed final of the CONCACAF Champions League as part of their partnership with the governing body.
April 27 – Kenyan-based online gaming firm SportPesa has expanded its football sponsorships in Europe becoming the official African betting partner of Spain’s La Liga in a three-year deal.
April 25 – Newcastle United’s re-ascent to the Premier League will immediately catapult the club into ninth place in the Premier League social media rankings, but is it a position that perhaps reflects the under achievement of what is undoubtedly one of England’s most passionately supported clubs?
April 25 – Manchester City has expanded its partnership with London-listed but China focussed technology, content and services company BNN. The new deal will see the club deliver coaching programmes and unique content via the Xinhua News mobile app.
By Paul Nicholson
April 24 – When Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg launched its augmented reality Camera Effects developer platform last week at its annual developer conference last week in California, Manchester United teamed up as the demonstration guinea-pig to demonstrate the applications.
April 24 – The Dutch Eredvisie has signed telecommunications operator KPN in a four-year deal as the league’s main sponsor from the start of next season.
April 21 – Nissan has released its latest Excitement Index findings that show reveal Real Madrid vs Bayern Munich was the most exciting Champions League match this season, but that overall Barcelona top the Excitement Index Team League.
April 21 – European furniture retail chain Conforama has signed a three-year title sponsorship with France’s Ligue 1. The deal, reportedly worth €10 million a season, will start with the 2017-18 championship and run though to the end of 2019-20.
April 21 – The trend towards recognising the Women’s club game in England as a sponsorship opportunity at club level and separate to the mens team, is continuing with double title winning side Manchester City Women signing Hays as their Official Recruitment Partner. This follows the deal unveiled earlier in the week when Liverpool’s Women’s team announced Avon as their shirt sponsor.
April 20 – Liverpool Ladies Football Club have signed Avon as the women’s team shirt sponsor, the first time the shirt sponsorship has been sold separately to the men’s shirt sponsorship which is currently held by Standard Chartered.
April 12 – After struggling to find fresh commercial sponsors in the wake of the corruption probe that brought the organisation to its knees, Fifa is set to seal a major partnership with Qatar Airways within weeks, agency reports have quoted unnamed sources as saying.
April 11 – Manchester United broke their own impressive Twitter record this week putting on a massive 95,700 new followers, a weekly record for this season. It was also another good week for Chelsea who continued their weekly twitter dominance of Arsenal with their own season record 67.200 new followers.
April 10 – AC Milan may be struggling to finally get the sale of the club to Chinese investors off the ground, but main sponsor Emirates is having no such problem with its involvement with the club, unveiling an A380 aircraft sporting a special AC Milan livery at Milan Malpensa International Airport.
April 7 – The fast growing United Soccer League, awarded Division 2 status in the US professional league hierarchy this season, has boosted its broadcast coverage for the 2017 season just kicked off.
By Paul Nicholson
April 6 – FIFA’s struggle to sign up commercial partners to its reformed vision and upcoming World Cup in Russia was given some much-needed relief with confirmation that China’s Hisense, a white goods and electronics company based in the east-coast city of Qingdao, has put its name to the 2017 Confederations Cup and 2018 World Cup as an official sponsor.