What the Evolution of Kit Sponsors Tells Us About the Premier League

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

Pop quiz. What links the following companies: Packard Bell, Eidos, One2One, Walkers crisps, Elonex and BT Cellnet?

The answer, as any self-respecting football geek of a certain vintage will know, is that they all decorated the shirts of a mid-ranking Premier League club during the 1990s. (And bonus points to those who identified Leeds United, Man City, Everton, Leicester, Wimbledon and Middlesbrough as the logo-bearers.)

If the mere mention of these corporations summons the nostalgia-flecked image of a Curtis Fleming or a Danny Cadamarteri, be assured you're not alone. A glance back over the shirt sponsors of years gone takes us beyond just memory lane. Look closely, and you'll notice that the supersonic recent history of England's top flight can in fact be quite closely chronicled through the logos that have been plastered across its midriffs.

For England's biggest clubs, sponsorship deals have always tended to take a distinctly international flavour – indeed, the country's first sponsorship deal (excluding Kettering Town's short-lived effort) was between Liverpool and Japanese conglomerate Hitachi in 1979. But for those outside of this elite few, shirt sponsors in the early days were more often than not locally sourced. Nearby car dealerships were a favourite go-to patron – Middlesbrough's first sponsor was Datsun Cleveland, Portsmouth's South Coast Fiat – but this was the height of glamour in comparison to some. Sheffield Wednesday's inaugural deal, for instance, was with Rotherham-based sink-fitters Crosby Kitchens; Bradford's was with local yoyo-merchant M.E. Norman Toy City.

By the time 1992 came around and England's top division secured its milestone and cash-splashed breakaway from the Football League, clubs were beginning to look further afield for affiliates – although not by far. In the first season of the newly branded Premier League, a total of 13 shirt sponsors were still companies based in the UK (a number which has dropped to four today).

What's more, eight of these businesses hailed from areas local to the club – be it south-coast hardware producers Draper Tools (Southampton), London radio station LBC (Wimbledon) or Yorkshire computer makers Sanderson (Sheffield Wednesday). Perhaps most quaintly of all, for a decade up until 1995 Sheffield United's kits were sponsored by a South Yorkshire timber merchant (and when Alan Cork played, looked like they were being worn by one, too).

Pleasingly, the phenomenon remained alive and well within the top flight during the Premier League's nascent years. In East Anglia, Ipswich Town struck a decade-long deal with local chemicals company Fisons before moving on to Suffolk ale-brewers Greene King, while Norwich City were bedecked in the logo of the Norwich and Peterborough Building Society until 1997. JD Sports, then a modest retailer based in Bury, sponsored Oldham during their two-year stint in front of Sky Sports' cameras.

Local sponsors bore silent witness to some of the modern era's iconic moments. When a teenage Roy Keane was belted in the chops by Brian Clough for an underhit backpass en route to the 1991 FA Cup final ("The best thing he ever did for me," the masochistic Irishman later grimaced) he was donning the logo of local Nottingham brewery Shipstones. Ludek Miklosko's octopus-like performance in goal for West Ham against Manchester United on the final day of the 1994/95 season, which effectively handed Blackburn the league title, was done bearing the name of East End Ford dealership Dagenham Motors.

Indeed, a local sponsorship deal has been responsible for one of the all-time great kit-quirks: Goodyear, a Wolverhampton-based tyre manufacturer adorned Wolves' audacious 1992/93 number with not just the company's name but nifty imitation tyre marks, too. The design was sadly scrapped after a year.

And even when the companies involved were not immediately local, the kit deals of the Premier League's formative years often tended towards the endearingly low-key. Unfortunately neither Scunthorpe United, shirts emblazoned proudly with the logo of windswept seaside theme park Pleasure Island during their 1994/95 campaign, nor Scarborough Town during their year bankrolled by Black Death Vodka in 1991/92, made it into the top tier. But one similarly bizarre dalliance that did get itself elite-level exposure was the one between QPR and Classic FM. The partnership – surely the product of a misfiled focus-group report somewhere along the line – was tragically short-lived, but did provide the world with the enduring image of a latter-years Ray Wilkins, hairline retreating rapidly, haring around Loftus Road while advertising the nation's favourite broadcaster of snooze-inducing orchestral melodies.

But alas, those were different times. Compared to two decades ago, the list of companies who've brokered themselves advertising space on today's top-flight kits paints a very different portrait of the sport. While it would be little surprise if sales in some of the more affordable Sharp TV sets had taken a steep rise around the Greater Manchester area during the 1990s, it's fair to say that few Salford residents will have rushed out to test-drive the latest model of Chevrolet when United struck a £47m-per-year deal with the luxury car-maker in 2014. The level of fan/sponsor contact is presumably similar on Merseyside, where the number of branches of multi-tentacled global investment bank Standard Chartered around the Stanley Park area is roughly equal to the number of local residents who would care to patronise one.

And it's not just the country's most well-established clubs whose sponsors' gazes are cast towards the world's wealthy few. Swansea City, who 12 years ago came within a whisker of dropping out of the Football League altogether, now form one half of a lucrative partnership with the Hong Kong financial trading consortium GWFX, whose rather cryptic and jargon-swamped website description mentions everything from pensions to currency exchange to precious metals.

A glance over the current sponsors confirms one of the sport's more insidious recent developments, too: top-level football's tightly entwined connection with online betting. If the unending barrage of sub-Guy Ritchie adverts that are now a mainstay of any half-time ad break wasn't enough to drum home the ubiquity of industry, you might want to note that over a third of Premier League kits currently bear the logos of internet gambling companies (and accountancy aficionados may like to note that five of those seven firms are based in either Gibraltar, Malta or the Philippines). Today, one-click bets and Premier League football go together like a horse and carriage.

And just behind the betting companies are the airlines. Specifically, Emirates and Etihad Airways: two state-affiliated companies from oil-rich Gulf microstates whose entries on the website Human Rights Watch makes for quite a read. Their financial expansion into Premier League football is merely one branch of an ongoing project to strengthen geopolitical alliances through the accumulation profile-boosting properties on western shores.

We needn't only look to foreign companies for ethical murkiness, either: one of the four remaining domestic sponsors is Wonga, the much-loathed payday money-lenders (annualised interest rate: 1509%).

There do remain two locally-based sponsors of Premier League kits, but both come with caveats. Bet365 adorn Stoke City's shirts due to the fact that Peter Coates is chairman of both the gambling firm and the football club; Southampton's sponsor, the electronics company Veho, is headquartered in the south-coast town but also has offices in Singapore, Dubai, New York and Hong Kong. Both mark a far cry from the days of Draper Tools and Cristal Tiles, the latter one of Stoke's early sponsors.

All in all, the lesson to be taken from these before-and-after snapshots is nothing especially new. The Premier League has marketed itself rampantly across the globe at roughly the same time and roughly at same rate as advances in technology has made the term 'global village' a reality.

Today's list of shirt sponsors is simply a reflection of the league having become a wholly international attraction, with the price of advertising space hiked accordingly. Now, only the most moneyed of international conglomerates can elbow their way on to the front of a top-flight shirt.

In return, of course, comes excitement and spectacle in the form of uber-talented footballers from the world's farthest-flung corners. In the same way that West Ham have swapped Steve Lomas for Dimitri Payet, they've also gone from Dagenham Motors to the Betway Online Gambling Group, with their income from shirt sponsors having gone up by a factor of 60 (from £100k a year to £6m) in the process.

Sponsorship deals are rarely central to the conversation about the divorce of romance from top-level football – after all, they have always by their very nature been profit-seeking enterprises, and profit-seeking is largely seen as the enemy of romance. But the fact does remain that many of the deals of the past did provide a real, visible – not to mention economic – connection between a club and its local community: the very bond that is so often cited as having been eroded by the cash tide of the modern era. If nothing else, a look back over two decades of shirt sponsors offers a stripped-down pictorial history of this process.

There is still the tiniest chink of light, though. Hull City look reinvigorated in the Championship this term and appear good candidates for a return to the top flight. That raises the a distinct possibility that next season could see Steve Bruce's men take to the Premier League's pitches bearing the name of what would very possibly be the greatest top-flight sponsor of them all – North Yorkshire's animal-themed resort Flamingo Land. Here's hoping.

@A_Hess