The 2014 UEFA Champions League final reached an estimated average audience of 165 million viewers worldwide. Expectations for this year’s final — on Saturday, between Juventus and FC Barcelona, in Berlin — are even higher, according to Jamie
Graham, CEO of Team Marketing. The Switzerland-based company is the marketing partner for all of UEFA’s club competitions, including the Champions League since its introduction in 1992. Team also is the exclusive commercial partner for the Champions League and its sister competitions: the UEFA Europa League (a second tier, to the Champions League) and UEFA Super Cup (which matches the two league winners). Among its deals, the company recently negotiated a three-year renewal with Sony valued in the high eight figures annually for its Champions League sponsorship, and it helped bring on FedEx as the main sponsor of the Europa League in a three-year deal valued in the high seven figures annually.
Graham spoke recently with staff writer Ian Thomas about the commercial growth of the UEFA properties.
■ How does the partnership model for the UEFA properties differ from other entities?
GRAHAM: In the Champions League, we have eight partners; in the Europa League, there are six; and we sign deals on a three-year cycle, with the next cycle to begin this year. Between media and sponsorship, we’re going to have an overall increase of about 50 percent in revenue compared to the last cycle. We are now working with brands from across the globe, which bought in to promote themselves and the competition on a worldwide basis.
■ In addition to the sponsorship work that the company does, how does Team Marketing work with UEFA?
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Last year’s Champions League final reached an audience estimated at 165M.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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GRAHAM: Team is known as a marketing agency, but in some ways we’re a brand agency, too. Before matches, our staff is there to clean the stadium and make sure it’s proper for our sponsor presentations. We pay a lot of attention to the delivery on the TV side and make sure it has a consistent look and feel. Wherever you see Champions League across the globe, you recognize it.
■ What kind of growth are you seeing globally for the tournament?
GRAHAM: While we’re a European competition, our biggest audience for the 2014 final came from Brazil. We look at the growth in North America and South America of soccer generally, where our partners Fox and ESPN have had great success and which helped to more than double our rights for revenue. It speaks to how global the Champions League brand has become.
■ What is being done to elevate the Europa League toward the level of the Champions League?
GRAHAM: We have taken a lot of time and effort in developing that competition, which in its current format was launched in 2009. We took some lessons learned from the Champions League, centralized the rights, and took a more careful look at the selection of sponsors and what we were doing to grow the competition’s brand.
■ How do you keep building upon the commercial success the Champions League has had thus far?
GRAHAM: UEFA has a marketing plan on how to make the competitions more global and make [them] available to more eyeballs, so that could be impactful to a commercial point of view. If there are changes to the competition format, whether that’s more games or different times suiting a global audience, that creates more inventory. We’re also considering technological developments like digital advertisement replacement on a region-by-region basis as well as ways we can package rights in other ways.
