Manchester United are to unveil a new multi-year sponsorship of their training kit by announcing a partnership with blockchain platform Tezos.
The Athletic can reveal that the parties have agreed a deal worth in excess of £20 million per year and United have already shot promotional materials at the club’s training centre ahead of an announcement. The Carrington training ground itself is not included in the agreement.
United’s previous eight-year £120 million sponsorship contract with American insurance company Aon concluded at the end of last season.
Discussions to replace Aon with The Hut Group were reported to have collapsed when the Manchester-based company pulled out due to concerns about a fan campaign to boycott United’s commercial partners as part of a protest against the Glazer family’s ownership of the club. The team have been operating without a front of shirt training sponsor this season.
United have subsequently held discussions with other companies, including several in the blockchain space, and are now due to unveil a major deal with Tezos.
Tezos, which is underpinned by the Tezos Foundation, is a blockchain, or a type of decentralised computer network like Ethereum.
To advocates, blockchains like Tezos could be a way to carry out computerised transactions more efficiently than current technology and help to remove expensive middlemen from the process.
Detractors highlight the fact that blockchain transactions require huge computing power which emits carbon.
Tezos, however, presents itself as a more energy-efficient platform. United are understood to have conducted due diligence before agreeing the deal and consider the partners to be credible.
United’s deal has given the club confidence that its commercial appeal to partners remains strong despite the pandemic and a testing period of performance on the field. United’s summer signing of Cristiano Ronaldo from Juventus has been a factor in helping to drive commercial opportunities during this campaign, although United view these benefits as secondary to his potential contribution as a player.
Tezos is inherently linked to its own digital token — Tez — which crypto traders buy and sell to try to make profit. Crypto trading is highly risky and volatile and largely unregulated. The value of the Tezos token has risen a lot in the last three years but has plummeted since November, mirroring crypto prices more broadly.
Tezos has been investing in sport sponsorship, notably becoming the New York Mets first blockchain deal in May 2021 and indeed the first of its its kind for any of the 30 Major League Baseball outfits.
In May, Red Bull Racing Honda unveiled a partnership with Tezos in which the blockchain secured a deal to build the racing team’s first ever NFT experience. Tezos has also become a sponsor of McClaren Racing across Formula 1, Indycar and Esports.
In January 2022, the French esports organisation Team Vitality named Tezos as its primary technical partner, described as one of the largest deals in “European esports history”, in which Tezos secured front-of-shirt visibility.
United declined to comment. Tezos were contacted by The Athletic but did not respond prior to publication.
It is also believed that the deal may involve collaboration beyond the United’s training kit, which would help United in their attempts to maximise opportunities in the technology space, including the metaverse and “web 3.0”.
(Photo: Getty Images)
Should there be any concerns over the Tezos deal with United?
JOEY D'URSO: Blockchains rely on vast computing power to carry out transactions, which have been linked to carbon emissions and environmental degradation.
Tezos says it is more energy-efficient than other blockchains, but independently verifying these sorts of claims is hard. Furthermore, while blockchains make grand promises about remaking the world through complex use cases that will baffle most football fans, if you search the world ‘Tezos’ on social media, most people will be talking about something else — the Tezos cryptocurrency token which can be bought and sold on exchanges. Mirroring other cryptocurrencies, it has risen substantially in value since it was launched in 2018, but has crashed since November of last year.
To a cynic, the United deal’s main benefit could be that it ends up pumping the value of the cryptocurrency token, rather than marketing this technical computer network to the masses.