I've just been listening to the News - and, after a segment about Barclays Bank 'sacking' their boss, I heard that they do not intend to renew PL sponsorship after 2016. Any thoughts?
I think they're planning on binning the headline sponsorship completely, so it's just called the Premier League. Then they'd have partners instead, like they do in the Champions League and the World Cup.
This was a decision driven by the Premier League - As OLM states the brand is the PL. With the amount of money for TV rights, I'd guess league sponsorship has become such a small part of the overall revenue it's now not worth it!
Or more likely, they can make more money from multiple partners than they can from a single title sponsor.
They actually expect to get much more with a multi-sponsor partner arrangement, than they do with a single main sponsor. Edit - Airlie beat me to it.
I thought the whole point of it was no sponsor and the brand is the Premier League. So it's just no headline sponsor with several secondary sponsors? I listened to it discussed a while back and it seemed there'd be no sponsors at all.
I'm assuming that it will be exactly the same as the World Cup and Champions League, the pitch-side boards will all be given over to a handful of main sponsors, along with the boards behind the managers at press conferences and pre/post match interviews.