On March 24, 1973, a stag appears on the chests of Eintracht Braunschweig's players, replacing the club crest. It was not a new emblem: it was the logo of a liqueur brand, and a workaround for a federation ban. Fifty-three years later, a single shirt deal brings Arsenal £70 million per season. Here's how footballers' chests became one of the world's most expensive advertising spaces, and how this changed the way a shirt is designed.
Before 1973, the shirt was bare
During the first eighty years of organized football, a shirt bore only three things: a color, a crest, and a number. National federations explicitly banned any commercial lettering, with one consistent argument: the shirt represents the club and its city; it is not meant to be a sales platform.
The ban also reflected a practical problem. At the time, television broadcast few matches, so a logo on a shirt had only local value, limited to spectators in the stadium. No advertiser was willing to pay much for such limited visibility. The obstacle was as much economic as regulatory, and it held as long as both barriers held together.
Jägermeister's Stag Trick
The opening comes from Germany, and from one particular man: Günter Mast, head of Jägermeister, who wants to put his brand on a Bundesliga shirt. The German federation refuses. Mast then finds a remarkable loophole in the regulations: the rules ban advertising, but allow the club to choose its own emblem.
So he proposes that Eintracht Braunschweig replace its crest with the brand's stag's head, in exchange for 100,000 marks. The club's members vote in favor. On March 24, 1973, against Schalke 04, Braunschweig takes the field with a liqueur logo in place of its crest. The federation is caught by its own wording and can do nothing to object.
The dam breaks immediately. In the months that follow, Hamburg signs with Campari, Eintracht Frankfurt with Remington, and MSV Duisburg and Fortuna Düsseldorf with their own partners. Within three seasons, shirt advertising goes from illegal to standard in the German league, and the ban is officially lifted for the 1976–1977 season, finally allowing Braunschweig to spell out the brand name.
England and the television blackout
The United Kingdom followed three years later, but with much longer resistance. On January 24, 1976, Kettering Town, a Southern League club, became the first British club to play with a sponsor's name on its shirt—that of a local tire dealer. The English Football Association immediately ordered the inscriptions removed.
It took several years for the practice to become established, and the real obstacle was no longer the federation but the broadcasters. The BBC and ITV flatly refused to film teams wearing a sponsor, citing the ban on covert advertising on air. Clubs were forced to have two sets of shirts: one with a sponsor for matches not televised, and one without a sponsor for those shown on television.
Barça, the last bastion to fall in 2006
One club resisted longer than all the others and made it part of its identity. FC Barcelona played without a shirt sponsor until 2006, the only major European club to do so, relying on its status as an association owned by its socios rather than that of a commercial company.
The end of this status took a form no one expected. In 2006, Barça did not sell its shirt: it bought the right to display a logo on it. The club signed an agreement with UNICEF under which it paid the humanitarian organization $1.5 million a year in exchange for the right to wear its logo. An operation that ran completely counter to the logic of sponsorship, and a considerable image coup.
The interlude lasted only five years. In 2011, the club signs a standard commercial contract with the Qatar Foundation, then with Qatar Airways, before moving on to increasingly lucrative partnerships. The UNICEF logo was moved to the lower back, where it still appears today. The last bastion had fallen, and it did so in the most spectacular way possible.
Where the sponsors are today: mapping the shirt
A modern shirt no longer has just one sponsor: it can have up to five, distributed across distinct placements that are sold separately and at very different prices. Here is the complete map of the commercialised spaces.
The biggest contracts of the 2025–2026 season
Premier League shirt sponsorship has reached a level that no other league comes close to. Here are the division's three highest-value contracts, illustrating the scale of today's market.
One important point when comparing these amounts fairly: the scopes are not identical. Arsenal's contract with Emirates, extended until 2028, covers the jersey, stadium naming rights, and training kits. Manchester City's excludes training kits, while Manchester United's excludes both training and naming rights. On a strictly like-for-like basis for the jersey alone, the differences narrow considerably.
The Arsenal jerseys have also carried the Emirates name continuously since 2006, making it one of the longest-running partnerships in English football and probably the one that supporters most spontaneously associate with the club's visual identity.
What the sponsor changed in jersey design
The arrival of a logo in the center of the chest did more than add an element: it reconfigured the entire design of the garment. Three concrete consequences, visible on any modern jersey.
The stripes had to be spaced farther apart
A jersey with closely spaced vertical stripes makes a logo illegible. Striped clubs, from Juventus to Newcastle and Athletic Bilbao, have gradually widened their stripes or created a more neutral area in the center of the chest to give the sponsor room to breathe. The very fine stripes seen on jerseys from before 1980 have virtually disappeared from professional football for this precise reason.
The center of the jersey has become a protected area
Designers now work with a non-negotiable constraint: a central rectangle must remain sufficiently plain and high-contrast to accommodate the logo. All patterns, gradients, and graphics are moved to the shoulders, sleeves, sides, and lower part of the jersey. This largely explains why contemporary jerseys are more creative on the sides than on the chest.
The sponsor's colors factor into the equation
A sponsorship contract requires a specific logo treatment, and therefore a minimum contrast with the background. Some clubs have had to adjust the exact shade of their historic color or add an outline to the logo to comply with the partner's brand guidelines. On light-colored jerseys, it is not uncommon for the sponsor to require an alternative version of its logo, creating variations from one kit to another within the same season.
Regulation takes back control
After fifty years of continuous liberalization, the trend is reversing. The shirt is becoming a regulated object again, and the 2026-2027 season marks a very concrete turning point in England.
England is thus joining an older European movement. Italy has banned this type of sponsorship since a 2019 law, and Spain has enforced comparable restrictions since the 2021-2022 season. The reasoning is the same everywhere: the visibility of a betting logo on a shirt worn by children raises a public health issue that the financial argument can no longer offset.
The clubs that said no
Rare, but they do exist. Three cases deserve attention because they were driven by very different reasons.
This last point explains something many supporters notice without understanding why: national team shirts always seem more streamlined than club shirts. It is not an aesthetic choice, but a direct consequence of the regulations.
Frequently asked questions
The first sponsor to appear on a shirt in a major professional league was Jägermeister, on Eintracht Braunschweig's shirt, on March 24, 1973, in the Bundesliga. The logo appeared in place of the club crest to circumvent the German federation's ban. Kettering Town was the first British club, in January 1976, with lettering that was immediately removed on the Football Association's orders.
Because FIFA and UEFA regulations prohibit it in official competitions. Federations have their own partners, but their visibility is limited to stadium hoardings, training kits, communications materials, and pre-match clothing. The match shirt itself may carry only the kit manufacturer, the federation crest, and official distinctions.
The usual ballpark is between one-fifth and one-tenth of the main sponsor's value, with significant variations depending on the club and the contract duration. Sleeve placement was authorized in the Premier League starting with the 2017–2018 season and has since become widespread in Europe's major leagues, becoming a significant source of revenue for mid-table clubs.
Almost always, but not systematically. Some competitions require different sponsors or no sponsor at all, resulting in so-called competition versions that are not sold commercially. It also happens that a partner does not hold the rights in certain countries, producing regional versions of the same shirt. Collectors highly seek out these variants precisely because they are produced in small quantities.
A Logo That Tells the Story of an Era
Seen from 2026, a football shirt is a historical document as precise as a newspaper. The name spread across the chest tells you who was financing football at a given time: liquor and appliance brands in the 1970s and 1980s, automotive manufacturers and telecom operators in the 1990s, Gulf airlines in the 2000s, betting and cryptocurrency platforms in the 2010s, and now technology companies as regulation pushes out the previous players.
This is also what makes reading a collection interesting. Lining up twenty seasons from the same club is like leafing through twenty years of economic history. On Elite Fanstore, you will find the latest shirt releases, featuring the sponsors that will shape the visual memory of 2026.