Culture
Chelsea gambled by not agreeing a cheaper shirt sponsor deal – will they reap the reward?
There are two ways to look at Chelsea not signing a front-of-shirt sponsorship deal before the start of the season.
You could view it as a failure, with companies not wanting to fork out £45million-plus for the privilege of being in prime position on their kits following a disappointing Premier League campaign in 2023-24, buoyed by the narrative that the club’s owners, Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly, don’t know what they are doing.
The alternate view, echoed within their home stadium Stamford Bridge, is that Chelsea rolled the dice and gambled on their sporting performance improving, therefore rendering it foolish to enter a long-term deal with a potential partner in the summer when the front-of-shirt value could be sold for a much bigger fee just a few months later.
In this case, both can be true, yet it’s evident no company was willing to pay what Chelsea were asking for, otherwise the players would be sporting some brand’s logo on their chests already.
One opportunistic company even shared a press release at the beginning of November, announcing the ‘exclusive news’ it had secured a deal to become Chelsea’s new front-of-shirt partner for the rest of the season. When challenged on the fact this simply wasn’t true, the firm, which will remain nameless, thought it would still be a good story for media outlets to run.
The club hierarchy’s choice to hold their nerve, to not just accept a low-ball figure for the sake of it, could be about to pay off — and it is a bet not many others in the game would have been willing to make.
New head coach Enzo Maresca has been a transformative appointment, guiding Chelsea to third in the league. There is a good feeling around Chelsea and the potential of their young squad.
This has led to renewed interest from potential partners when it comes to Chelsea selling their front-of-shirt sponsorship, meaning they have orchestrated something resembling a beauty contest to drive up the price.
Enzo Fernandez during Chelsea’s 4-3 win against Tottenham this month (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Chelsea sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, have indicated to The Athletic that the process is nearing its end — their shirts will have a sponsor before the season ends.
Leading the negotiations for securing a lucrative deal are Jason Gannon, the club’s president and chief operating officer, Todd Kline, their new president of commercial, and Casper Stylsvig, their chief revenue officer.
Chelsea’s starting point for this deal has always been at the Champions League level. Their domestic rivals competing in Europe’s elite club competition are the benchmark, and they didn’t want to accept an offer that would look cheap, despite playing in UEFA’s third-tier Conference League.
The view from the other side of the negotiation table, however, was one that essentially asked, ‘Why would we give you Champions League money when you aren’t even in that competition?’. There was also a fair sense of concern about how this season would play out, given the change from Mauricio Pochettino to Maresca in the dugout.
Manchester United, the outlier in this scenario due to years of underperforming on the pitch, recently extended their deal with technology firm Snapdragon, which sees them earn $75million (£59.8m at the current exchange rate) per year for their front-of-shirt asset.
In July 2022, Liverpool extended their deal with bank Standard Chartered to the end of 2026-27, with The Athletic being told it constituted a significant uplift on the previous £40million-a-year contract. Arsenal’s Emirates airlines deal — which was renewed at the start of last season, meaning it will have lasted for 22 years when the latest extension ends in 2028 — is reportedly worth £50m a year.
Chelsea are seeking around £60million a year, which they believe is the going rate for the Premier League’s elite clubs, especially those competing at the top end of the table.
The Athletic’s special report into Manchester City’s sponsors in 2022 detailed that they receive more than £67.5million a year from Etihad Airways, from the United Arab Emirates home of its owners, for sponsorship including matchday shirtfronts.
At the beginning of last season, again having failed to secure a front-of-shirt sponsorship, Chelsea signed a short-term deal for 2023-24 with Infinite Athlete, a biomechanics engineering company, which was worth over £40million to the club.
“Somewhere between £45million and £55m a year would probably be your typical Champions League high-ranking Premier League club’s value,” explains Professor Rob Wilson, from the University Campus of Football Business.
“In the context of this conversation, hindsight is our friend, so if it was a strategy in the summer, then you have to give Chelsea a pat on the back. But I can’t see it. I just think they simply weren’t able to sign a sponsor that was prepared to spend £40million a year, so they have sat on it looking for what they might find.
Chelsea are the only one of the 20 Premier League sides without a front-of-shirt sponsor (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
“They are now at the top end of the league and that makes them a more interesting proposition.”
Short-term and long-term sponsorship deals remain a possibility. One sticking point in negotiations with potential partners is that Chelsea are not looking to sign with anyone for five years, preferring shorter contracts. They don’t want to be stuck in a five-year deal if, as predicted, there is a sponsorship boom in football linked to the 2026 men’s World Cup, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.
“The power of the American investor is coming into play,” explains Richard Busby, chief executive of BDS Sponsorship — one of Europe’s most prominent consultancies in the field. “The World Cup in 2026 and its impact in America is crucial to what happens to shirt-sponsorship prices.
“If it starts to really get big viewership in America — the Premier League is still relatively small in America when it comes to viewership — then, clearly, there is a lot more money potentially available.”
This is a view also shared by senior figures at Chelsea. The club have been in discussions with several potential partners, including airlines and tech companies. The Middle East and the United States are generally viewed as where most of the sponsorship money is coming from, although Asia has also been touted as an emerging market.
Chelsea, naturally, see themselves as an attractive proposition. Being located in London is a significant part of that thinking, along with an improved sporting performance and brand identity, having won the Champions League twice in the past 12 years. What shouldn’t be overlooked, however, is that Chelsea have lost ground on their rivals by not having a front-of-shirt sponsor in place sooner.
Wilson says: “Chelsea should be worth somewhere between £35million and £40m a year. They’re obviously asking for a bit more than that to benchmark themselves against Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City, but it’s more the opportunity cost of the lost revenue.
“When you think about PSR (the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules) headroom, they are going to be extraordinarily tight. What they’ve done over the last couple of years is they’ve sold the hotel (at Stamford Bridge), they’ve sold the stake in the women’s team, and that is all geared up around their PSR compliance calculation.
“So, when you effectively aren’t able to weigh in an additional £40million worth of shirt sponsorship, that’s quite a sizeable amount of value against that calculation, hence why they’ve had to take those drastic steps to sell those assets.”
While Chelsea have gone through the first five months of the season with no front-of-shirt sponsor, they do have a longer campaign ahead than most. Yes, these months have gone, but 2024-25 could extend into July for them due to their involvement in the first revamped and greatly expanded Club World Cup.
The recently announced free-to-air DAZN broadcast deal for that U.S.-hosted tournament means any front-of-shirt sponsor that eventually does a deal with Chelsea is going to have more eyeballs on it from a global perspective — even if nobody knows how many people are actually going to tune in to watch the competition.
This means Chelsea can still appease companies feeling somewhat uneasy about committing to a deal in the second half of the season. But with Chelsea still to play in the FA Cup (they are at home to fourth-division strugglers Morecambe in round three next month) and through to the round of 16 in the Conference League in March, there are still plenty of fixtures to take place.
Busby says he would be “very surprised” if Chelsea could do a deal for such a significant fee in “less than nine months”, also noting January is “budget month” for many corporations, meaning that is the time they are sitting down to work out where money could be spent.
There is also the theory that anything spent on a shirt sponsorship has to be matched by the paying company to market it.
Chelsea did a short-term deal with Infinite Athlete last season (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
“For every pound spent on a sponsorship fee, theoretically, you should be spending the same in terms of making the activation work,” Busby says. “When Coca-Cola sponsor the Olympics, they are spending eight times as much on getting it activated as they do on the sponsorship fee.
“Now, you don’t need to spend eight times as much (in Chelsea’s situation), but you still need to spend a lot of money on a global sponsorship beyond the figure everyone sees reported.”
From the perspective of the Premier League’s PSR, which state clubs are allowed adjusted losses of £105million over a rolling three-year period, not having a front-of-shirt sponsor in place is far from ideal.
Chelsea are yet to publish their financial results for the year ending June 30, 2024, with those expected to land at Companies House in the early part of 2025, but they reported operating losses of £121.4million (2021-22) and £90.1m (2022-23) in the previous sets of accounts. The sale of two hotels to a sister company for £76.5m in 2023 helped ensure they remained on the right side of the Premier League guidelines, and the sense coming from the club is that even without a front-of-shirt sponsor being secured, they are going to be fine going forward.
Wilson, however, disagrees.
“They will breach this year unless they can bring in some additional revenue from an alternate source,” he says. “The only thing they have left to sell is their shirt sponsorship.
“Because of the hotel sale, combined with their transfer activity in the summer, they are going to be right on the limit for the year ending 2024. They will have a black hole in their 2024-25 accounts, unless they sell the shirt sponsorship, or they have a positive net transfer spend next summer. But they have to do that before June 30, because they will need the transfer receipts before the PSR year ends.”
Chelsea sources said to The Athletic they were confident there is no risk whatsoever of them breaching PSR for this season.
Chelsea are confident a front-of-shirt partnership will be finalised sooner rather than later, but, until then, the only Premier League side among the 20 without a partner’s logo on the chests of their matchday jersey will continue to be an outlier.
Whether or not Chelsea can generate their ideal fee remains to be seen, yet their decision to roll the dice and say no to taking a lower-valued deal was a bold and, in hindsight, brave move.
There is an expectation the 2026 World Cup, largely hosted by the United States, will change the football sponsorship market (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)
If the predictions about a potential sponsorship boom for Premier League clubs on the back of a successful 2026 World Cup prove true, then Chelsea, whose youthful squad will be a couple of years more experienced collectively and should be both regulars in the Champions League and competing for trophies once again, could be one of the first in line to cash in.
United are tied up with Snapdragon until 2029, Emirates will sponsor Arsenal until at least 2028 and Liverpool’s relationship with Standard Chartered runs to 2027. This means Chelsea could be the biggest Premier League club without a front-of-shirt sponsor, which is likely going to drive up interest due to the limited inventory.
If Chelsea’s season tails off, and playing in the Champions League again once more becomes a faraway dream, then they could find themselves back at square one. But when you roll the dice, especially in football, that’s the risk you take — and Chelsea made that move with their eyes wide open.
(Top photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment celebrates lines from popular crime novels. (As a hint, the correct books are all “firsts” in one category or another.) In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the novels if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Xia De-hong, who survived persecution and torture as an official in Mao Zedong’s China and was later the central figure in her daughter’s best-selling 1991 memoir, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” died on April 15 in Chengdu, China. She was 94.
Ms. Xia’s death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Jung Chang.
Ms. Chang’s memoir, which was banned in China, was a groundbreaking, intimate account of the country’s turbulent 20th century and the iron grip of Mao’s Communist Party, told through the lives of three generations of women: herself, her mother and her grandmother. An epic of imprisonment, suffering and family loyalty, it sold over 15 million copies in 40 languages.
The story of Ms. Chang’s stoic mother holding the family together while battling on behalf of her husband, a functionary who was tortured and imprisoned during Mao’s regime, was the focus of “Wild Swans,” which emerged out of hours of recordings that Ms. Chang made when Ms. Xia visited her in London in 1988.
Ms. Xia was inspired as a teenager to become an ardent Communist revolutionary because of the mistreatment of women in the Republic of China, as well as the corruption of the Kuomintang nationalists in power. (Her own mother had been forced into concubinage at 15 by a powerful warlord.)
In 1947, in Ms. Xia’s home city of Jinzhou, the Communists were waging guerrilla war against the government. She joined the struggle by distributing pamphlets for Mao, rolling them up inside green peppers after they had been smuggled into the city in bundles of sorghum stalks.
Captured by the Kuomintang, she was forced to listen to “the screams of people being tortured in the rooms nearby,” her daughter later wrote. But that only stiffened her resolve.
She married Chang Shou-yu, an up-and-coming Communist civil servant and acolyte of Mao, in 1949.
It was then that disillusionment began to set in, according to her daughter. The newlyweds were ordered to travel a thousand miles to Sichuan, her husband’s home province. Because of Mr. Chang’s rank, he was allowed to ride in a jeep, but she had to walk, even though she was pregnant, and suffered a miscarriage as a result.
“She was vomiting all the time,” her daughter wrote. “Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car.”
That was the first of many times that her husband would insist she bow to the rigid dictates of the party, despite the immense suffering it caused.
When she was a party official in the mid-1950s, Ms. Xia was investigated for her “bourgeois” background and imprisoned for months. She received little support from Mr. Chang.
“As my mother was leaving for detention,” Ms. Chang wrote, “my father advised her: ‘Be completely honest with the party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict.’ A wave of aversion swept over her.”
Upon her release in 1957, she told her husband, “You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband.” Mr. Chang could only nod in agreement.
He became one of the top officials in Sichuan, entitled to a life of privilege. But by the late 1960s, he had become outraged by the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s blood-soaked purge, and was determined to register a formal complaint.
Ms. Xia was in despair; she knew what became of families who spoke out. “Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the fire?” she asked.
Mr. Chang’s career was over, and both he and his wife were subjected to physical abuse and imprisoned. Ms. Xia’s position was lower profile; she was in charge of resolving personal problems, such as housing, transfers and pensions, for people in her district. But that did not save her from brutal treatment.
Ms. Xia was made to kneel on broken glass; paraded through the streets of Chengdu wearing a dunce’s cap and a heavy placard with her name crossed out; and forced to bow to jeering crowds.
Still, she resisted pressure from the party to denounce her husband. And unlike many other women in her position, she refused to divorce him.
Twice she journeyed to Beijing to seek his release, the second time securing a meeting with the prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was considered a moderate. Ms. Xia was “one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking,” her daughter wrote in “Wild Swans.”
But Ms. Xia and her husband never criticized the Cultural Revolution in front of their children, checked by the party’s absolute power and the fear it inspired.
“My parents never said anything to me or my siblings,” Ms. Chang wrote. “The restraints which had kept them silent about politics before still prevented them from opening their minds to us.”
She was held at Xichiang prison camp from 1969 to 1971 as a “class enemy,” made to do heavy labor and endure denunciation meetings.
The camp, though less harsh than her husband’s, was a bitter experience. “She reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion,” her daughter wrote. “She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unbearable.”
Xia De-hong was born on May 4, 1931, in Yixian, the daughter of Yang Yu-fang and Gen. Xue Zhi-heng, the inspector general of the metropolitan police in the nationalist government.
When she was an infant, her mother fled the house of the general, who was dying, and returned to her parents, eventually marrying a rich Manchurian doctor, Xia Rui-tang.
Ms. Xia grew up in Jinzhou, Manchuria, where she attended school before joining the Communist underground.
In the 1950s, when she began to have doubts about the Communist Party, she considered abandoning it and pursuing her dream of studying medicine, her daughter said. But the idea terrified her husband, Ms. Chang said in an interview, because it would have meant disavowing the Communists.
By the late 1950s, during the Mao-induced Great Famine that killed tens of millions, both of her parents had become “totally disillusioned,” Ms. Chang said, and “could no longer find excuses to forgive their party.”
Mr. Chang died in 1975, broken by years of imprisonment and ill treatment. Ms. Xia retired from her government service, as deputy head of the People’s Congress of the Eastern District of Chengdu, in 1983.
Besides Ms. Chang, Ms. Xia is survived by another daughter, Xiao-hong Chang; three sons, Jin-ming, Xiao-hei and Xiao-fang; and two grandchildren.
Jung Chang saw her mother for the last time in 2018. Ms. Chang’s criticism of the regime, in her memoir and a subsequent biography, made returning to China unthinkable. She told the BBC in a recent interview that she never knew whether her mother had read “Wild Swans.”
But the advice her mother gave her and her brother Xiao-hei, a journalist who also lives in London, was firm: “She only wanted us to write truthfully, and accurately.”
In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.
Fashion
At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.
Contemporary Art
For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.
Architecture and Design
The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.
Fine Dining
At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.
Literature
The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.
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