FOR major soccer leagues in Europe, the final of the UEFA Champions League is the usual swansong of the league season. Last Saturday, Bayern-Munich faced Borussia Dortmund in the 2012/ 2013 Champions League Final. To most soccer fans, that should be competition enough. But for brand experts, market analysts and sponsors, it goes beyond the action on the turf. It is the time to count the cost, analyse the value and dissect various strategies and successes of competitors in different categories of sponsorship.

For instance, in the world of footwear and apparel, the final battle was between Adidas and Puma. These are brands kitting Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, respectively. According to global news agency, Reuters, Puma is catching up with Adidas and Nike in soccer sales.

Among all sports, football has indeed scooped the most sponsorship deals according to research by IFM Sports Marketing. The annual World Sponsorship Monitor report shows that while other sports struggled for sponsors, football attracted about $4.5 billion in global sponsorship in 2012.

In league sponsorship, banking giant, Barclays, recently extended its sponsorship of the Premier League in England until 2016 in a three-year deal worth £40 million a year from 2013. The Barclays Premier League is broadcast for over 185, 000 hours a season reaching 212 territories and over 650 million homes with a cumulative global audience of 4.7 billion. Another banking giant, BBVA Bank is the title sponsor of the equally popular Spanish La Liga and La Liga B in a deal that could be worth up to $97 million annually.

In the kitting category, the largest shirt sponsorship deal in history of sport so far was signed last year between Manchester United and General Motors. The car maker paid $659 million for a seven-year contract with the English champions. In April, the club also signed another sponsorship deal with Aon Insurance Group. The company paid almost $30 million per season for the rights to Manchester United training ground, training shirts and overseas tours. According to the Aon Chief Marketing Officer, Phil Clement, the price is reasonable considering the international reach provided. “We felt that for global reach it was good value,” he said. “Compare it to running an advertising campaign in 120 countries. Advertising is difficult. To have one programme that works globally, externally and internally – that’s a nice value proposition,” he explained further.

Also last year another English football club, Arsenal, extended its annual shirt and stadium sponsorship deal worth $45 million annually. Spanish Real Madrid sold its shirt for €30 million per season.

It is The UEFA Champions League that attracts mega multinational brands. This soccer festival is sponsored by a group of multinational corporations, in contrast to the single main sponsor typically found in national top-flight leagues. The tournament’s current main sponsors are: Ford, Gazprom, Heineken, MasterCard, Sony, UnCredit and HTC. These corporations dole out millions of dollars for perceived mileage that is created in the eight months and 144 matches-worth of sponsorship activation.

For instance, the official website of UEFA reveals that the FC Bayern München’s 2-1 Wembley victory against Borussia Dortmund was aired in more than 200 countries to an estimated global average audience of 150 million and a projected global unique reach of over 360 million viewers.

The final attracted a peak of 23.78 million (average 22.5 million) viewers in Germany, a record for a UEFA Champions League fixture in the country. The competition has provided that nation’s top three most-watched broadcasts so far in 2013: Bayern’s semi-final second leg away to FC Barcelona and Dortmund’s semi-final first leg against Real Madrid occupy second and third spots respectively.

Indeed, the final is one of 15 match days in the UEFA Champions League calendar and all of them proved to be extremely popular with fans, generating global audiences of between 105 and 228 million viewers during live match broadcasts.

The UEFA Champions League continues to be the prime driver of traffic to UEFA.com, with a 13 per cent year-on-year growth in visits and 25 per cent in visitors to the competition’s homepage – a section recently nominated for a prestigious Webby Award. Complementing traditional coverage was the use of key digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube, extending the number of followers of UEFA’s official social media channels to around the 22 million mark. On Facebook, where the brand has over 10 million fans, people have been playing a football and fingers-themed pinball game, emulating the star of the TV advert, to earn bragging rights against their peers. During the semi-finals, Dutch football legend Clarence Seedorf took to the brand’s Twitter account to offer his take on the action in real-time and respond to questions set by fans.

UEFA further expanded its digital outreach with innovations at the four-day UEFA Champions Festival and at Wembley Stadium, where over 1,000 tweets and posts from fans and famous names were displayed on the giant screens before and after Bayern’s victory. Even online, remarkable opportunities were also created. The latest Facebook analytics, provided by Sports New Media, reveal that UEFA’s page was growing at a faster rate than every other sports league in the world. Along with the UEFA Champions League, the UEFA Europa League and UEFA.com pages have grown by over 100 per cent over the last five months, while the official UEFA Women’s Champions League page has enjoyed 248 per cent surge over the same period.

All these opportunities are the windows sponsors like international beer brand Heineken, now in its seventh consecutive season of involvement with the UEFA Champions League tournament, expect to leverage on.

Heineken’s Global Brand Activation Director, Hans Erik Tuijt, in an online chat reveals that his brand has created a number of eye-catching executions, building on the learning and experience of previous years’ activity such as Heineken Star Player, the innovative dual-screen game as well as various activities in specific local markets.

Evaluating Heineken’s sponsorship strategy and related things the brand has learnt in recent year, Tuijt said, “first of all, it’s important to remember why we do sponsorship; ultimately, it’s a more efficient way to have a conversation with your consumers. It’s perfect for a beer brand — the best conversations happen over the best beer. Intrinsically, I think beer brands should sponsor as it gives you talkability. So, we sponsor the things that people like to talk about; the James Bond films, football, rugby. Believe me though; if our fans liked synchronised swimming we would sponsor that. With our sponsorships, we do two things strategically: we create conversations, and we bring the sponsorships into our world. So instead of sponsoring something and saying, “we’re so proud of it”, we bring them into our world with the Heineken tone of voice.

“We put our strategy into these big icons. With the new advert for the Champions League, Road to The Final, the briefing was that it needed to be aired across the whole world. We know that in the U. S. for example, and other important markets, they are not necessarily big football markets, so it needed to work as a brand campaign, but with a Champions League theme. That’s the new strategy in place. Create a conversation and put the brand point of view in so that people can say, ‘hey, that’s typically Heineken’.”

On the mode of activating the brands sponsorship globally Hans Erik Tuijt explained that the brand, being in different stages in different markets, is activated in about four different ways.

In his words, “we say to our marketers in different markets that either you’re anchoring the brand (so you’re small, there’s not much premium beer, we’ve limited awareness and distribution), or you’re building (so there’s more distribution, and awareness is above say ten per cent but below the thirties) or you’re a ‘Starface’ (where we are the established premium brand).

“In ‘anchoring’ market, it’s a small beer market. So we run one or two trial promotions around the Champions League final, which we then complement with ATL. In the ‘building’ markets, engagement is the focus in these markets. The likelihood is that people have trailed us at some point, so the sponsorship gives us a reason to have more of a conversation with people. Converting for us here becomes a lot easier through the sponsorship. In our ‘Starface’ markets, the whole marketing mix comes in. Sometimes the challenge is to remind marketers that we’re ultimately a beer brand, not a football brand. People also forget that Heineken has 1.5 per cent of market share worldwide. We’re small; the beer industry is actually small. In individual markets there are hundreds of local brands. We believe that with the Champions League, we’re building the beer market.”