With football "growing richer every year," Heineken has described the sport as "totally overcrowded" from a sponsorship standpoint, according to Thomas Hobbs of MARKETING WEEK. Last week, the beer brand renewed its 27-year association with rugby "after announcing its headline sponsorship of the Rugby World Cup 2019." Heineken Global Sponsorship Dir Hans Erik Tuijt said that both the success of the 2015 Rugby World Cup and the fact rugby has been added to the Olympics "has expanded the sport to a larger international audience." He said, "Perhaps the English perspective is rugby has a very particular middle class fan but the audience [coming off RWC 2015] is now a lot broader. It is now talked about a lot in markets such as Asia and America." Tuijt feels football is "becoming a much harder property to navigate for mainstream brands." When comparing rugby with football, he "concedes the latter is becoming more and more cluttered." Tuijt: "Football is totally overcrowded. If you take FIFA World Cup, for example, there’s far too many brands associating themselves directly. It is difficult to cut through whereas you don’t have that as much with rugby" (MARKETING WEEK, 3/7).
