On 8 September, Liverpool announced that Turkish Airlines will take over the front of its shirt from June 2027. The five-year agreement has been reported at more than £300 million, which puts it above £60 million a year, and it ends a 17-year run by Standard Chartered. The bank stays on as a global partner.
The number is the part everybody repeated. The harder question starts the morning after the contract is signed. What has the airline actually bought, and how will anyone know whether it worked?
The fit is easy to describe. Liverpool counted 1.5 billion social media engagements last season and claims a following on every continent. Turkish Airlines flies to more countries than any other carrier. The club’s chief commercial officer called the airline a globally recognised organisation with an extensive international network. The airline’s chief executive called the club one of the world’s most recognised and respected, with a truly global community of supporters. Both sentences are true and neither is a plan. Strategic fit explains why a deal makes sense at the start. It tells nobody afterwards whether it worked.
Two sponsors, two answers, no evidence
The most useful case study is sitting inside the deal being replaced. Standard Chartered went onto Liverpool’s shirt in 2010, and by the 2022 extension the arrangement was reported at around £50 million a year. Seventeen years is long enough for a sponsor to stop looking like a campaign; the logo becomes part of how the club appears in photographs, in replays, in the memory of a trophy. Ask what it delivered, though, and the public record thins out. When the bank extended, its group chief executive said the partnership’s success was more than anyone could have imagined and that the bank was proud to be associated with the club. That is a reasonable thing to say at a signing. It is not a result.
For the opposite version, look down the M62. TeamViewer, a German software company, signed a five-year deal for the front of Manchester United’s shirt in March 2021 at about £47.5 million a year. In August 2022, after a single season, it announced it would not extend beyond 2026. The brand-building effect had been positive, it said, but it was reassessing its marketing strategy and expected a significant improvement in margin once the agreement ended. Its share price had fallen more than 70% since the deal was announced.
Two sponsors, comparable money, opposite conclusions. Neither could show its working, so one argument was settled by mood and the other by share price.
The five tests, in order
Sponsorship effectiveness is not one question. BBF tests it in five stages, the five Rs, and they run in order because each one has to earn the next. The point of a sequence rather than a single figure is that it shows where a sponsorship stopped working, which is the only finding a brand can actually act on.
Turkish Airlines starts with the first test already passed. The audience is enormous and it is receptive: Nielsen’s 2025 global sports research found 51% of people worldwide identify as football fans, and that 67% of them find sponsoring brands more appealing, against 54% of the general population. Reach establishes what the asset would have cost to buy elsewhere. It does not establish that anything happened.
Recognition is the first honest reading, and it can be taken inside a season. Can supporters name the airline on the shirt without prompting, and do they attach it to the club rather than to football in general? Standard Chartered had seventeen years to build that link. Turkish Airlines starts from nothing in 2027, and a large logo seen by very many people can still leave almost no memory of who owned it.
Resonance is where the airline finds out whether it bought the right property. The attributes at stake are specific: international network, connectivity, prestige, and whether the brand enters the shortlist when someone is choosing a flight between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The useful comparison is not the airline before and after. It is people exposed to the Liverpool association against similar travellers who were not.
Response is where brand effect turns commercial. Searches, site visits, loyalty enrolments, enquiries, redemptions of supporter offers, seats sold. Match-linked campaigns, destination promotions and club travel packages all create behaviour that can be tracked, which ordinary shirt exposure cannot.
Return is the test almost nobody publishes, for two reasons. The first is incrementality. Turkish Airlines already flies to more countries than any other carrier and keeps adding routes, so bookings rising during the sponsorship cannot simply be credited to the shirt; a usable read compares exposed markets with similar unexposed ones over the same period. The second is cost. The fee buys access. Activation, media, hospitality, production and the staff running it are charged separately, so the real annual figure is well above £60 million and only the airline knows by how much. Setting a rights fee against an estimated media value answers neither question.
By 2032 Turkish Airlines should be able to say considerably more than how many people saw the logo. The value of a sponsorship is not proved by reach. It is proved by how far the effect travelled past it.
Author: MOHAMMAD SIFAT
