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PUT IT ON YOUR SHIRT AND PUT YOUR SHIRT ON IT

4:00pm Thursday, 3rd September 2009

It was thirty years ago today (well almost) that a Liverpool group began to play a new commercial game. They kicked off a trend which became (well almost) as big as the Beatles. The 'group' was Liverpool FC and the new game was shirt sponsorship which first started at the beginning of the 1979 season.

Was the idea of wearing a brand name on your chest a sudden bolt from the blue (or in this case the Red) - a Eureka! moment - for one of the Club execs? Not quite. How it came about was, to say the least, more prosaic. In those days, the FA regulated what was - and more often wasn't - allowed by way of commercial brand exposure at football matches. There were dozens of FA sub-committees too, and the Minutes of their many meetings were regularly circulated around Club bosses - who, perhaps understandably, rarely bothered to wade through them.

At Liverpool, times were busy; the club had recently won back-to-back European Cups. But the long-serving CEO, Peter Robinson, found a spare moment over the summer of 1979, and browsed through the Minutes of a minor FA sub-committee meeting. He was amazed to read that shirt sponsorship had just been 'legalised'. There wasn't a sniff of it in the papers. No one else had realised.

He instructed an agent to locate a likely company (with less than twelve letters in its name) and the little known, Hitachi, showed interest. Within weeks, the Club cut a 3yr deal worth a total of £450,000 - with cash up front each season - and 'shirt value' was born.

It caused a terrible fuss at the time: Man United and Everton were not best pleased with the stolen march. More importantly, the two TV companies - BBC &ITV - who featured a few live games every year, refused at first (each for very different reasons) to show Liverpool matches with the name on the shirt; not even highlights. It took a while for them to come round to the idea - but even then apparently the BBC, prior to their televised games, would always send a chap round with a ruler to measure the height of the lettering!

How times have changed. Liverpool's current shirt deal with Carlsberg is valued around £8-9m a year (yet to be renewed, though talks continue). But that money is dwarfed by the sum Man United currently exact from their sponsors, at £20m plus.

Despite the credit crunch, the top clubs at least seem to be able to continue to extract significant cash value from their shirts - with the single, remarkable exception, of course, of Barcelona who donate their shirt space to Unicef in one of the cleverest acts of generosity the football world has seen. It is undoubtedly generous - a tremendous promotional gift to a global charity - but it also underlines and subtly promotes the core values of the Barca brand - 'More than a Club' - more effectively than any overt 'message' ever could.

The big European clubs still do valuable shirt deals but life isn't so easy further down the pecking order. When West Ham's sponsor, the travel company, XL, went bust last season, the logo on the claret and blue shirt had to be hastily hidden. Unusually in the Premier League, both Wigan and Bolton did a joint deal with 188BET at reduced values, and West Brom kicked off the season without a name on their shirt at all.

It's largely thanks to the betting companies, in fact, that shirt values have remained so high. The company Bwin forks out over £20m for just two clubs - but they get the Real Madrid and AC Milan shirts in return (some would say, cheap at the price). Football betting revenues have grown enormously this decade, with over £1 billion laid in bets every weekend in the Far East (though accurate figures are understandably hard to find - it could be twice that sum).

Going forward, betting companies will probably continue as mainstay sponsors for the cash hungry clubs of Europe.

You can (well almost) put your shirt on it.

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