Who's next to lose their shirt?

Forget the thousands of job losses, rising inflation and soaring energy bills - the real progress of the financial crisis will be measured by English football's folding sponsors, says Barney Ronay

• Barney Ronay
• The Guardian,
• Thursday September 18 2008

At the start of the second world war it was the bananas that went first. With the fire of London it was rats. As the British economy continues its whoopee-cushion-style contraction, the effects of impending meltdown are also being felt in some unexpected places. Last season brought the near collapse of Northern Rock, Newcastle United's shirt sponsors. A week ago West Ham's sponsors XL went bust, prompting the removal of their name from the club strip. At the weekend the Hammers played West Bromwich Albion, also without a logo after failing to find a deal. Even more ominously, post-Lehman Brothers all the talk is of the travails of the insurance giant AIG - which happens to be the shirt sponsors of Manchester United. For big business the writing isn't so much on the wall as on the chests of the nation's footballers.

This is all very much in keeping with football's rampage into the cultural and economic mainstream. For the past decade or so the Premier League has acted as convenient shorthand for the wildest excesses of the UK's consumer-driven economic boom, an acme of vulgar consumption. Now, as the tide continues to turn, football is right back in the vanguard of things, a sandpiper running ahead of the surf. Never mind the inflation basket, the job-seekers' queue or the cost of borrowing. Future economic historians will be able to measure the progress of the credit crunch by English football's folding shirt sponsors.

This isn't the first time football shirts have delivered an oblique commentary on changing economic times. Kit sponsorship was first permitted as recently as 1979, the same year Margaret Thatcher came to power. It would be a further 10 years before clubs were actually allowed to wear their logo-plastered strips on live television. But in those early days kit sponsorship arrived in a rush, a visible symbol of the early Thatcherite emphasis on consumer-led economy, a decade of ad-boom and marketing thrust.

Early football-kit sponsors were often drawn from the middle ranks of domestic commerce: breweries, garden centres, double-glazers, photocopier suppliers, package holiday dealers. The names of those first-generation shirt sponsors read like an elegy for changing times: Talbot at Coventry City; British Caledonian at Ipswich; the mysterious Withey Windows at Norwich; plus assorted small-town accountancy firms and business consultancies. An exception was Liverpool's 1979 strip, with its striking white HITACHI, which is generally considered shirt sponsorship's first iconic design. The stark capitals tested to the full the FA's draconian, if charmingly pre-decimal, restrictions: 16 square inches, with letters no more than two inches high.

There was another side to all this, a meeting of minds with what was happening in the stands. The encroachment of labels and brands wasn't just a football thing, it was a 1980s thing. And so the terraces gave us the casual, the game's most decisive extension into high-street fashion, ultimately via the likes of JD Sports and assorted other leisurewear providers. For the label-obsessive fan, the newly commerce-spattered football ground provided the perfect catwalk to parade his Fred Perry, his Lyle & Scott and his crimplene Sergio Tacchini tracksuit top. With the casual, football provided a youth movement that pre-figured the past 20 years of label-conscious culture and the fetishising of the visible blue-chip clothing brand.

Liverpool fans are widely credited with kick-starting the movement, inspired in part by their team's trips to Italy in the European Cup. As the players paraded their Hitachi kit, soon to be followed by the Crown Paints era, supporters stocked up on priceless limited-edition continental labels, to be flaunted on their return to the domestic terrace. The mature casual look emerged as something close to an ambitious junior executive on a golfing weekend after getting dressed in the dark in a branch of TK Maxx. It's a look that football has bequeathed to the nation's shopping centres, one that arrived hand in hand with kit sponsorship and has matured with the growth of the replica shirt as leisurewear. Perhaps the turning of the tide for the shirt sponsor might even prefigure a similar era of brand austerity on the pinched, crunched and pressed UK high street.

In many ways the disappearing logo is to be celebrated. Not just as a sop to the traditionalist lament about rampant and all-consuming commercialism. There have also been some terrible mistakes along the way, as two distinct and separately focus-grouped design forces, the kit and the commercial logo, have been dramatically conjoined.

Aston Villa's claret and blue was briefly augmented by a migraine-inducing bright purple and lime-green sponsor's logo. At the junk-food end of things the brief partnership of convenience between Pizza Hut and the black-and-white shirts of Fulham spawned the vaguely nauseating incongruity of extreme physical activity and a dinner-plate-sized deep-dish food product. The same with Wolves and their giant Doritos logo. It just didn't sit well.

Arsenal provided a few laughs during their Sega shirt period, a word that would be regularly removed during away trips to play in Spain (sega means "wank" in Spanish). West Ham spent five years displaying the name of kit manufactures Pony, which in the local East London rhyming slang means "crap" (from pony and trap).

There have some quirky additions too. For several seasons Tranmere Rovers were sponsored by Wirral borough council. Presumably it needed the publicity. Clydebank were briefly sponsored by the pop group Wet Wet Wet. For years Atlético Madrid's owners, Columbia Pictures, would change the club's shirt sponsor according to which Hollywood blockbuster was on release. Atletico's Spiderman II period involved a total redesign of the away shirt.

The current trend for the disappearing logo also tells us much about football and its miraculously self-sustaining revenue streams. Until now football has surfed above the credit crunch, its finances mysteriously fizzing with independent life. During the summer transfer window, record amounts - some estimate as much as £500m - were spent by English clubs. For now, at least, it's still all boom at the very top.

Disappearing sponsors notwithstanding, this looks set to continue for a while. Early kit deals may have opened up a vital new source of revenue. But this was in the pre-hyper inflationary days when even the big clubs wrestled annually to balance their relatively meager turnover. Space on Manchester United's shirts is currently leased out for close to £10m a season, but this is hardly make-or-break money. The disappearance of AIG would simply be an inconvenience, or an opportunity for a merchandise-shifting rebrand. These days the kitty is stocked by TV rights deals, billionaire owners and the global merchandising arm.

With this in mind, a new trend among clubs involves abandoning the commercial sponsor altogether in favour of something philanthropic. This season Aston Villa are sponsored by the Acorns children's hospice, a gesture on the part of the club's billionaire owner, Randy Lerner, to emphasise Villa's community ties. Similarly, but on a more global scale, Barcelona are currently wearing the name of Unesco: a freebie perhaps, but also a canny addition to the Catalans' club-of-the-people brand.

For now the disappearing football-shirt logo remains a hieroglyph of troubles elsewhere, an indicator of the economic meltdown on the thermals of which football continues to float in its own superheated fiscal bubble. For how much longer remains to be seen, of course. The shirt logo has had its say in the past. Perhaps, like the marauding rats of the great fire, you ignore it at your peril.