At the Toyota Stadium in Texas, home to FC Dallas, the soccer club, the players are getting a taste for Blackpool rock.
Matt Cairns, the founder of Lancashire-based Eleven Sports Media, likes to bring the pink-and-white hard candy over when visiting his growing stateside clientele from the town where his marketing business began. And it’s not the only sweetener on offer.
While sponsorship involving elite sport is typically skewed towards big brands, the Eleven model brings the opportunity to small businesses by incentivising top teams with six-figure payment in return for offering their stadiums for pitch-side branding and networking events.
“Traditionally, the time and inclination needed to acquire a high volume of low-spending organisations doesn’t make commercial sense for elite sports teams,” says Cairns, adding that smaller businesses’ typically limited marketing function has also counted against them.
“Big teams are used to dealing with global corporations that can easily showcase the investment and don’t need marketing support, so that is where we add further value as the intermediary, building the social media audiences of the small business to consolidate the exposure.”
What began from a small office in Blackpool in 2009 with static advertising boards and one team — second-tier Plymouth Argyle — has grown into a business with an £11.1 million turnover, fuelled by growing traction stateside now accounting for 70 per cent of Eleven’s growth and 55 per cent of total revenue.
For Cairns, an approach rooted in paying a six-figure sum to teams may have meant some early cashflow challenges but the “risk” has deterred competitors and left a far-reaching and receptive market to pursue.
Of the 424 UK businesses he has on board, 92 per cent sell to other businesses, spanning construction to professional services, paying around £10,000 a year and benefiting from networking events held at the stadiums and venues, as well as the advertising. “Typically, one or two new business wins cover their sponsorship fee for that year,” he says.
The offering has been further bolstered by a proprietary digital proposition introduced in 2012 aimed at improving the quality and relevance of live match content including player data to match statistics typically screened in the stadium.
“It proved to be a turning point for the business because in providing something to boost the fan experience, we were soon securing more teams including Newcastle United and Crystal Palace and building more enduring partnerships,” he adds.
“At the time, content providers were very tired and generic, focused on the big clubs like Manchester United. If you were a Blackpool or Rotherham fan watching a game in the stadium, they’d be very little content on your team, so this was an opportunity to fill this gap and strengthen our local business packages.”
While stateside expansion was mooted a decade ago, for Cairns, whose approach was always to visit teams and prospects in person, it seemed too great an investment in time and resources. It wasn’t until the Covid pandemic and the shift to a remote and more efficient way of working that horizons were broadened, and the market was pursued more seriously.
Eleven won its first US deal with New York City football club. More followed, including basketball team the Milwaukee Bucks and the American football team the New York Jets, with Cairns discovering early on that the world’s biggest sports market — valued at $49.76 billion this year — was in some ways quite small.
“If you do a good job in the US you’ll grow quickly because everyone in the industry talks to each other and we were inundated with approaches from teams from different leagues,” he says, adding that it’s the variety of mainstream sports that makes the market so lucrative.
“Whether it’s baseball, American football, ice hockey, they all have these ardent, engaged fanbases whereas in the UK you’ve got the Premier League football and then there’s quite a chasm between that and the next league down.”
Indeed, it seems a multitude of factors have conspired to make the US the main focus for the business next year with the launch of a new office at Charlotte, North Carolina. Small businesses, says Cairns, were disproportionately affected in America during Covid, resulting in a healthy appetite from teams to play a positive role in the resurgence of the local business communities. Meanwhile, demand from businesses booking stadium hospitality suites for every game of a season is particularly high, as well as the “cross pollination” from businesses involved in partnership programmes across the different sports.
The scope has led to some US elite teams suggesting he charges the businesses involved more than the typical $30,000 fee but so far, he has resisted, preferring to “keep the integrity of the small business programme that we’ve had from the start”.
Closer to home YB Fixings — a Swindon-based tool, fixtures and fastenings specialist — is typical of the small business clients whose link up with elite sports teams have proven fruitful.
One year into its partnership with Eleven and exposure via pitch-side branding with elite football teams including Celtic FC, Birmingham City, Crystal Palace and Leeds has replaced its traditional reliance on trade shows attendance.
YB Fixings commercial director Shaun Lee says: “In this industry there was a tendency to go to trade shows just because that’s what your competitors are doing even though the ROI wasn’t that great,” says, adding that the sport and construction sector has a natural synergy.
“A huge proportion of those working in the construction sector class themselves as football fans, so working with these clubs is one way of really hitting that demographic. We recently won new business from a Celtic fan because he saw the Celtic crest on the company email.”
It’s hoped the Celtic connection will help further with the company’s push into the Scottish timber frame market. Meanwhile, deals from club-based networking events have revealed new potential markets and customers in areas previously unexplored, including flooring and battery tooling.
“On our own with a marketing team comprising me and one other person, we didn’t have the time or clout to get access to some of these clubs so having Eleven as an intermediatory between us and these organisations has worked well,” said Lee.
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