Sports clubs are playing away from home when they sign sponsorship deals

In my final year, our trampolining club didn’t have much money. We missed competitions because we couldn’t afford the entry fees and travel. Like most clubs, we survived on membership fees and sponsorship, and when the sponsorship wasn’t there, it showed.

Last summer, our committee decided to do something about it and go looking for sponsors. That’s when things got complicated. We ran into problems with the sponsors themselves, and with fitting what we offered around the university’s existing contracts. We had no idea what we were doing. All we knew was that we wanted to build a successful club.

Then I started talking to other clubs, and they were all in the same boat. So I made it my dissertation.

We’ve never done this before

I spoke to ten committee members across six sports clubs at two universities: football, cricket, trampolining, gymnastics, futsal and cheerleading. Three things came up repeatedly.

Clubs depend on sponsorship, and not for extras. One gymnast told me sponsorship pays for an external gym, which the university doesn’t provide. That keeps prices down and gets more people through the door. Another said hiring a gym costs about £70 an hour. This is an access issue. Research from the University of St Andrews and Sheffield Hallam University shows that a student’s socio-economic background affects whether they take part in sport at all. When a deal falls through or is badly negotiated, it’s the students with the least money who feel it first.

The people signing the deals have never signed one before. “It’s the first time I ever looked at a contract… the first time I ever signed a contract,” one president told me. Not one of the ten had negotiated a contract before joining committee. They worked it out by rereading the document, or by asking the sponsor for a walk-through afterwards. Young volunteers, fitting this in around their degrees, are taking on legally binding commitments with no training and no one to check their work.

The other side of the table isn’t new to this. It’s the first contract for the student, and probably the twentieth for the business. Students told me they felt like “a little uni student” sitting across from full-time professionals. One worried about being taken advantage of, because sponsors “definitely know” how little students understand. Several didn’t know what a reasonable amount to ask for was, so they didn’t push. When your club badly needs the money, that’s understandable. But it means clubs may be leaving value on the table and signing terms they don’t fully understand.

Terms and conditions apply

Some of the biggest problems weren’t with sponsors at all. They came from existing university and students’ union (SU) contracts that clashed with what clubs wanted to do. Committees often didn’t know about them until it was too late.

One club planned bespoke kit with custom names and numbers. In October it was told it had to use a different supplier, which was more expensive and lower quality. Members told me they felt “blindsided”. Others described slow approvals from the SU that left them worrying the sponsor would go elsewhere.

None of this is anyone being unreasonable. Universities and SUs have legitimate contracts to protect. But the line between “university-wide” and “club-level” deals is rarely explained to the students expected to work within it.

It’s easy to see this as a small, club-level problem. I don’t think it is. Sports clubs are among the biggest drivers of belonging, wellbeing and leadership development in student life. And sponsorship is what keeps many of them running.

If the people responsible for that funding are guessing their way through it, we’re building a key part of the student experience on shaky foundations. And because committees change every year, whatever one works out the hard way is usually gone by the time the next arrives.

Before signing the dotted line

I don’t think the answer is to take sponsorship away from student committees. It’s a great opportunity to learn, and clubs need that independence. The problem is that we hand over legal and commercial responsibility with no preparation. A few practical things would make a real difference:

• Contract basics in committee training. Not a law degree, just a session on how to read a sponsorship agreement, what to look for and how to negotiate. Students asked for exactly this.
• A named person to go to. Someone in the SU or university who can look over a contract, or at least tell a committee when to be worried.
• Mentoring from people who’ve done it. Law and business alumni, law departments and lecturers are a ready-made pool of expertise. Mentoring would give committees confidence, and give mentors real advisory experience.
• Tell clubs about existing contracts early. A simple, up-to-date guide to which suppliers and sponsors are off-limits, and why, would have saved several clubs a lot of heartache.
• Faster, simpler approvals. If an SU sign-off takes weeks, it risks losing the sponsor. A clear timeline and a quick route for standard deals would help.
• Templates and a plain-English checklist. A standard sponsorship contract and a short guide to common clauses, like length, exclusivity and exit terms, would give committees a baseline to compare against.
• Help finding sponsors. Students wanted guidance on approaching sponsors and on what a fair deal looks like, including what other clubs have secured.
• Handover notes that survive turnover. Keep sponsor contracts, contacts and lessons learned somewhere central, so each committee doesn’t start from scratch.

Signing off

My sample was small, and I’d love to see this tested across more universities. But the pattern was striking, and when I told people what I was researching, almost nobody was surprised. That tells me this is happening widely, and mostly goes unspoken.

So here’s what I’d ask. As committee training gets planned, is sponsorship on the agenda? Does the person who’ll be signing the first contract know how to read one? And does your SU know which of your existing contracts could trip a club up?

If we expect students to keep their clubs funded, we should give them the tools to do it properly.