Starting this season, Premier League clubs are allowed to add another sponsor to their shirts. In addition to the main shirt sponsor on the front and the Premier League logo on the left sleeve, clubs can now add a smaller sponsor’s name to the right sleeve. Commercialism, ahoy!
So far, not as many teams have taken advantage of this as was probably assumed, with Manchester City and Watford announcing deals. Chelsea, as far as I can tell, are thus the third team to do so, but we’re the first to “expand” the partnership with the main sponsor rather than add a brand new sponsor.
UPDATE: Looks like Southampton beat us to that punch by six days. Drats!
Breaking: Chelsea get a sleeve sponsor, Alliance Tyres. Glad it's just white, could've been a lot worse pic.twitter.com/4h9NLYGYEW
— Joe Gillibrand (@GilliDesign) July 22, 2017
A few months ago, the vague rumor was that Carabao might look to make the jump from sponsoring strictly the training kits, but as it turns out, Chelsea will be sporting the ‘Alliance Tyres’ brand on the right sleeve, which as you might have guessed is related to Yokohama. In fact, Yokohama acquired Alliance Tire Group last summer for a cool $1.2billion.
It’s unclear if there is more money coming in from Yokohama thanks to this “expansion”, but I would hope that if we’re willfully submitting ourselves to logo creep, we’re at least getting properly rewarded. As per the Daily Mail, the shirt-sleeve spot is worth up to one-fifth of the value of the spot on the front of the shirt, for which Yokohama are paying around £40m annually.