Football sponsorship deals threatened – DW – 11/04/2024

‘We drive football’.

This is the motto under which Volkswagen (VW) has placed its football sponsorship. In a narrow sense, the motto refers to the automotive group that supplies vehicles to football clubs and national teams. However, in a broader sense it can also mean: ‘We promote football’.

VW has taken up the cause of helping develop football to become more diverse and increase gender equality, but to what extent will they still be involved in football in the future?

The closure of Volkswagen factories puts thousands of jobs at risk

Volkswagen – founded in 1937 during the Nazi regime – was the world’s largest car manufacturer in 2023, with record sales of more than €320 billion.

Last year, the company delivered more than nine million vehicles to customers and employed nearly 685,000 people worldwide.

However, the country is undoubtedly in the midst of a huge crisis. The group is reportedly planning to close three factories in Germany, with tens of thousands of workers fearing for their jobs.

Against such a background, it is quite conceivable that VW will scale back its football sponsorship. After all, the company’s financial commitment to sports is probably in the three-digit million euros annually.

During the last major VW crisis, which occurred due to the emissions scandal in 2015, the carmaker let some sponsorship agreements expire, for example with traditional German clubs Schalke and 1860 Munich.

VfL Wolfsburg was a flagship project

VW has a tradition of financial support in football that goes back almost 80 years.

VfL Wolfsburg was founded in 1945 after the end of the Second World War from the “Volkswagenwerk company sports association”.

According to the group, the Bundesliga club plays a ‘flagship’ role in the sponsorship strategy at VW’s headquarters, but exactly how much money VW is pumping into the wholly owned subsidiary is not known. The club has a special exception to the 50+1 rule in German football, which stipulates that no single shareholder can have more than 50% control.

Due to its legal structure, VW is not obliged to make the figures public, although it is currently reported to be worth between 70 and 80 million euros per year.

Wolfsburg’s men’s team became German champions in 2009 and won the German Cup in 2015.

The women’s team has won significantly more titles and has been crowned Champions League winners twice, German Champions seven times and German Cup winners eleven times.

Volkswagen sees itself not only in Wolfsburg as a “reliable partner for its local clubs”. In other German cities with VW factories, the group also supports local football clubs up to amateur level, for example in Hannover, Braunschweig, Kassel, Dresden and Zwickau.

Volkswagen also collaborates with Germany’s record Bundesliga champions, Bayern Munich, in youth football.

In addition, the VW subsidiary Audi is one of Bayern’s top sponsors, which holds 8.3% of the shares and supplies, among other things, company cars for professionals.

DFB contract has been reduced in size

VW describes its involvement with the German Football Association (DFB) as an “excellent example” of its sponsorship within football.

The group has sponsored the German Cup since 2012 and has been the main partner of the world’s largest national football association since 2019.

This year, both parties extended the sponsorship deal until 2028. However, according to media reports, VW reduced its support from around €30 million to around €20 million per year.

Volkswagen is the so-called ‘mobility partner’ of the DFB and provides vehicles for both the men’s and women’s teams.

Global football contracts are also at risk

VW has also been an international ‘mobility partner’ of several other football associations and their national teams for many years.

They have corresponding similarities with last year’s World Cup runners-up France (since 2014), Switzerland (since 2014), Finland (since 2017), Luxembourg (since 2018), Denmark (since 2019), Netherlands (since 2021) and Italy (since 2023).

They also have partnerships with two of the next three World Cup hosts. In Canada, VW sponsors the national professional men’s league, the Canadian Premier League, and in the US they are a “presenting partner” of the US Soccer Association.

The VW logo appears, among other things, on the training and warm-up jerseys of the US men’s and women’s national teams. That contract runs until the end of the 2026 World Cup.

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The other international partnerships are also limited in time and could therefore expire for cost reasons.

The 2024 European Championship in Germany showed that not every sports sponsorship at Volkswagen is set in stone.

After VW had acted as UEFA’s car sponsor at the previous European Championship, they decided not to do so at this year’s home tournament and left the field to the Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD.

The company claimed at the time that the decision was about: “an efficiency and cost savings program at all levels (…) with the aim of securing the future viability of Volkswagen.”

In other words: VW has to cut back – also in the field of sponsorship.

This article was originally published in German