Selecting the right football club to sponsor: Multi-criteria analysis

The sport industry is currently an important sector of economic activity In 2018, the global sports market was valued at nearly US$488 5 billionwith growth averaging at 4 3% since 2014 According to the European Commission Study on the Economic Impact of Sport through Sport Satellite Accounts, the share of sport-related Gross Domestic Product within the European Union equals 2 12 % (€279 7 billion), while the share of sport-related employment equals 2 72 % of total EU employment (5,666,195 persons) Due to the COVID-19 the global spectator sports market is expected to fall from US$144 2 billion in 2019 to US$139 5 billionin 2020 However, it is expected to recover and reach US$171 7 billion in 2023 The most popular and the most watched discipline in the world is football (soccer) It is one of a few sports played all over the world According to FIFA, the 2018 World Cup in Russia reached 3 572 billion people (more than half the world) and the final was seen by 1 12 billion viewers Football nowadays is not only a game and entertainment but also a billion dollar business According to the Sports Business Group at Deloitte, the European football market recorded an increase of 2% since 2017/2018 season and is presently (2018/2019 season) worth €28 9 billion Every year, about US$60 billionis pumped into sport through sponsorship deals According to KPMG the total value of sponsorship across ‘big five’ leagues (Bundesliga in Germany, La Liga in Spain, Premier League in England, Ligue 1 in France and Serie A in Italy) in 2020 is more than €3 3 billion (US$3 8 billion) It is worth noting that front-of-shirt sponsorship represents nearly a third of this figure In 2019, the biggest shirt sponsor of the leading 50 football clubs in Europe was the airline industry (€207 million) The second place was taken by the automotive industry (€159 million) Companies from Middle East spend most on European shirt sponsorships (€250 million) They are followed by Japan (€106 million) It is believed that football sponsorship allows companies to raiseboth brand awareness and profits as well as enter new markets Thus, the aim of this paper is to examine the potential of being sponsored of six selected Polish football clubs competing in the Ekstraklasa(the top division of Polish football) in 2019/2020 season An original approach that we called MAMIMCA – Multiple Assessment Multiple Importance Multiple Criteria Analysis – was adopted to choose the most suitable football club to sponsor In the evaluation conducted three different aspects were taken into account (sport, finance and commerciality, i e media attention and fan community), four well-established multi-criteria decision aiding methods were used (PROMETHEE II and EXPROM II with veto thresholds, modified ELECTRE III and TOPSIS) and four different vectors of weights were applied As the result the ranking of six selected clubs was obtained, accordance to the three criteria mentioned above used in order to obtain a comprehensive picture of football clubs © JPES