Rights holders want to know which categories to prioritise when selling sponsorship, so one angle is to focus on categories they’re most likely to do a deal with. In this edition, we look at rugby sponsorship deals.

There are two ways of looking at ‘most likely’, so we analysed 4,230 sponsorship deals since the start of 2023 to understand which categories are most likely to sponsor rugby rights holders.

A bit of maths

Firstly, ‘most likely’ can simply mean volume, i.e. which categories have done the most rugby deals. In this case, Food brands lead the way at 5.2% of deals. However, Food brands also do a lot of deals in other fields such as Soccer, Cricket, and Athletics. This means there’s a lot of competition successfully fighting for Food brand’s budgets.

So, the idea is to focus attention where there is less competition and this is where the second meaning of ‘most likely’ comes in: how likely is a category to do a deal in my field (in this case, rugby) compared to that category doing a deal in any other field?

This is called over-indexing, propensity or probability and is normally measured by a number (not a percentage). In this scenario, Landline Telecoms lead the way being 9.45x more likely to do rugby sponsorship deals versus with any other rights holder.

This is because the category accounts for 2.58% of rugby-related deals compared to just 0.27% of all other deals (2.58 divided by 0.27 = 9.45).

In other words, although Landline Telecoms brands do less rugby sponsorship deals than Food brands, they are the most likely to choose a rugby entity compared to any other type of rights holder. So, the level of competition (or noise) for a rugby rights holder when approaching this category is much less.

Going back to Foods, its over-indexing figure is 1.25x as Food brands account for 5.2% of rugby deals versus 4.1% of all other deals. So this only makes Food brands the 17th most likely category to choose rugby vs. any other rights holder.

What’s driving the most over-indexing categories?

Landline Telecoms has been driven by the UK market such as through BT’s renewal deal with four Welsh rugby union teams – Cardiff, Ospreys, Newport and Scarlets – along with the likes of Virgin Media’s sponsorship of Irish union side Munster.

In contrast, Rail & Road activity – the second most over-indexing category – is being driven by a wider range of providers. These include train companies (such as Lumo with union’s Newcastle Falcons and Hull Trains with league’s Hull Kingston Rovers), bus companies (e.g. First Bus with league’s Leeds Rhinos), taxi firms (such as Veezu with union’s Bath Rugby and Uber with New Zealand Rugby union) and car rental brands including Europcar with union’s Leicester Tigers.