Well, the
new shirts are finally out (not that you would think for a moment of buying them of
course), and they look reasonable. One thing about them jars, though. Throughout the last
ten years, on the outrageous rollercoaster ride that is Burnley, few things have remained
constant. One is that the same bunch of half-wits has kept control of the club. That
particular era may finally be coming to an end, although we shouldn’t hold our
breath, but another already has. Over those years, our shirts, whatever crazy colour they
may have been (pigeonshit crucifixes, green and black halves, the most recent
bastardisation) have always carried the prestigious name of Endsleigh.
They were, I think it’s fair to say, good sponsors. I like
constants in football, and one such should be a team’s sponsor. I am suspicious of
teams who change sponsors all the time, like Villa or Wimbledon. Clubs should always have
the same thing written on their shirts, like Arsenal or (one hesitates to say it, but) Man
Utd. Preferably, sponsors should also be some company with local standing, like
Leicester’s Walker’s crisps and Endsleigh with us. Sometimes it all goes wrong.
A few years ago, Carlsberg decided to associate themselves with this newly fashionable
game, so eagerly snapped up Liverpool for large money. Carlsberg’s main lager factory
is in Northampton, who were at that time on the very brink of receivership. Modern
football is a marvellous game.
Endsleigh were also a good sponsor because their logo wasn’t
flashy or embarrassing and they were a credible company. They weren’t small,
parochial, or incongruous, they didn’t have a stupid name, they weren’t run by a
director. Here we must pause to reflect on some of the worst sponsors of all time. Hey,
it’s been done before, but so what? Current most embarrassing sponsors must be
Millwall’s Live TV - the Weather in Norwegian. Millwall, incidentally, along with
dull club Tranmere, used to be part of another trend for which I have particular scorn,
viz., being sponsored by the council. This always struck me as having a humiliating ring
to it (but then, The Weather in Norwegian). No one ever got sponsored by the
council unless they had to.
Other amusing or tiny sponsors past or present are Verco (office
furniture, Wycombe), Danka (Everton), USA (i.e., Universal Salvage Auctions, Luton) Tulip
(Crystal Palace), Virgin (Palace again - I was desperate for the day when soap powder
manufacturers Fairy made their first foray into the game) and a particular favourite,
which manages to combine both the small scale and the ridiculous, Bradshaw’s Snack
Box (Bristol Rovers). Rumours that the shorts were to be sponsored by Bradshaw’s
Lunch Box never amounted to anything, sadly. Another favourite is Rebecca’s Jewellery
Southport that tiny, ridiculous, parochial and pathetic thing which adorned
Blackpool’s famous orange shirts. The shop was owned by the wife of then director
Billy Bingham, and was the only sponsor ever to introduce the name of a town other than
that of the club onto a shirt. The worst sponsor of all time is of course Rochdale’s
All In One Gardening Centre, which was also tiny and parochial, but above all tin pot,
with the words shaped to look like a watering can. They wore that on the front of their
shirts. We were in the same division as them. They once beat us at Turf Moor with nine men
and - I spluttered at the time - they had that on their shirts.
Next worst logo was Scarborough’s Black Death Vodka, with
dripping blood effect, for which they got censured on the basis that seeing such a thing
might give small children nightmares, as if watching Scarborough playing year after year
in the third division wouldn’t have the same effect. Other clubs have bent over
backwards for a dollar. When Watford were sponsored by Loctite they looked like huge
packets of said adhesive running round the pitch, so similar was the strip. Bournemouth
changed theirs to match the local bus company, which bunged them a few quid, and Coventry
once incorporated a subliminal Talbot T in theirs. Preston’s away colours were
switched to those of Baxi when they took over, whereupon they forfeited all claims to
superiority.
Our kudos was maximised when Endsleigh also sponsored the league, an
arrangement they got into because of the success of their deal with us and we became the
official league team. Then that bloke died in a car crash and they dropped the league, and
eventually us. Their involvement in the first place came out of a need to get local
recognition and an understanding that the best way to achieve this in Burnley was to
sponsor the football team, as nothing is bigger. They succeeded probably beyond their
wildest dreams, as their period of involvement coincided with an eventful time at the
club. I wonder how many Clarets now have Endsleigh insurance?
Nationwide now sponsor the league, and its newest entrants, Halifax.
In what was the second best feelgood story of the season (after Chris Waddle leaving,
naturally) they came back from the dead, returned to the league and approached huge local
company the Halifax (ex) Building Society for a measly few quid’s sponsorship,
whereupon the Halifax, being the demutualised, nouveau-PLC profit-is-our-bottom-line kind
of crew they are, told them to get stuffed. With PR antennae quivering, promptly in
stepped the Nationwide. Nice story.
Well, now we are left with apparently well know local computer firm
P3. When I first found out on a crackly phone line, I thought it was Peak Freen, makers of
pies and pastry, and got predictably excited. I might not have heard of them, but then I
know little of computers, and if they are obscure, nothing will ever be more so than POCO
Homes. We could have done much worse. We could have ended up with some director’s
enterprise, such as Interfilta (sic), or those senders of nasty letters to innocent
magazine editors, Steele, Ford and Newton. The whole team could have been sponsored by a
local plumbers’ merchants, instead of just the one stand. Panama Joe’s was once
also mooted; at least they have an obvious link with the playing staff. Shackleton could
even have taken over (sorry - am I drifting off into the realms of fantasy?) and we would
presumably be sponsored by "mystery backer, but they’ve got loads of money,
honest, and we can’t say more yet for legal reasons", which wouldn’t leave
much room on the shirts.
As mere fans (aka the people who have financially sustained the club
all these years), we naturally are not told how the club go about securing a new sponsor,
nor whether the quoted sum of six figures over two years includes pence. We know that, as
the case of the ludicrous sponsorship of the Harry Potts Longside proves, it helps to have
a relative on the board.
Do clubs need to be sponsored at all? How much money is involved? In
our case, we can’t turn down any cash. And, although left-leaning, I am also a child
of the eighties. Rather in the way that when you see old footage you don’t expect the
goalkeeper to pick the backpass up, so a team doesn’t look quite right in unadorned
shirts. We’re now so used to it that to see a shirt without one looks odd.
Occasionally we might play a side in plain shirts, and this provides us with a chance to
mock. Look, we say, they can’t even get a sponsor. It was presented as one symptom of
Doncaster’s malaise that they don’t have a sponsor.
It’s probably in the nature of things that our local sponsor
should be a computer firm rather than proper industry of the kind that used to make
things. Computer firms are heavily involved in sponsorship these days, presumably because
it provides a respectable connection with something traditional. Someone’s probably
written a thesis charting the decline of the manufacturing base through changes in shirt
sponsorship, so I’ll leave that to them. My ideal sponsor would be a company locally
based and nationally known, were it not for the fact that the Burnley Building Society
ceased to exist years ago. No archive footage of seventies matches is complete without a
hoarding for the Burnley, but all that advertising never paid off as they were subsumed
into the National and Provincial Building Society. They are still going, but lean
Bradford’s way.
No mention of the BBS is complete without reference to the
apocryphal story whereby some disaffected supporters of some other team (Blackburn,
Bolton, Preston, it changes with the telling) took their revenge for a defeat by smashing
up that town’s branch. That showed them. This naturally leads us on to the question
of the negative impact sponsorship can have. If one of the ideas behind it is to get
supporters to identify the product with the club, and so buy it (and why else would so
many drink companies do it?) then it follows that those who hate the club will also avoid
the sponsor’s products. Supporters of Man City and Spurs will always have a more
limited choice of electrical products than most. Personally, I am deeply suspicious of
McEwan’s beers, would not dream of taking out insurance with CIS and to this day
avoid all contact with Perspex. This represents a true test of real rivalry, and it is
interesting to note that for all Stockport’s pursuit of a fake hatred, I have happily
consumed many pints of fine Robinson’s bitter over the years.
If I had a choice of sponsors now it would be a local success story
whose products sell around the world: Moorhouse’s brewery. Regrettably, their logo is
a ghastly 70’s concoction, but we could still wear our shirts with pride. How about
Premier for home shirts, Pendle Witches’ for away, and an extra special all black
third strip for the splendid Black Cat mild? Do I get lavish free gifts for this plug?
