Kit sponsors can offer fond memories but betting logos would not be missed | Max Rushden

Tottenham with Holsten and Arsenal with JVC evoke shirt nostalgia but gambling is already front and centre in football

Forty years ago this week, Liverpool announced the first ever top flight sponsorship deal in the UK with Hitachi – £100,000 over two years. For the 1979 version of Twitter – presumably just people shouting in the street – this story must have trended. Football fans don’t like change, and a hifi manufacturer on the front of a pure red Liverpool kit, while everyone else was clear and unbranded, must have hurt.

Without radio phone-ins people must have written angry letters somewhere, or worse, actually spoken to each other about it face to face. Was this the first moment where someone claimed “the game’s gone”? You can just imagine Steve in Birkenhead claiming this was “the tip of the iceberg … soon Toblerone will sponsor the ball and change its shape and the game won’t be gone, it will be WELL AND TRULY gone”. The game has gone many times since, now it goes on a weekly basis – yet it still seems to be here.

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from Football | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/25/kit-sponsors-football-betting-logos

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