Another English soccer legend is retiring. David Beckham announced his retirement from pro soccer not long after his former coach, Sir Alex Ferguson, made the same announcement.

After two more games, Beckham will be hanging up his cleats, but the star athlete was sure to rack up a few more titles before he cleans out his locker. Thanks to Paris Saint-Germain' s recent win to claim the Ligue 1 title, Beckham is now the only person to have won four national club championships in four different leagues in four different countries. He's also the first English player to score at three consecutive World Cup finals, and he's been honored by the Queen of England. Not a bad rap for a guy that kicks a ball around for a living, but there's a lot more to Beckham's success than what simply lies on the field. 

"If you had told me as a young boy I would have played for and won trophies with my boyhood club Manchester United, proudly captained and played for my country over 100 times and lined up for some of the biggest clubs in the world, I would have told you it was a fantasy," he said, the BBC reports. "I'm fortunate to have realized those dreams."Continue reading...

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Manchester United has had a steady hand running the team for the last 26 years as it built itself into what Forbes has called the world’s most valuable sports brand, worth billions of dollars. Now, Sir Alex Ferguson, who managed the team to 13 league championships and at least double that in other championship cups, is calling it quits at the end of this season and going off to get hip surgery. 

"Manchester United has been transformed as a football club under the management of Sir Alex Ferguson," Dan Jones, partner in the Sports Business Group at Deloitte, told CNN.

The club’s popularity has allowed it to rake in sponsorship dollars, as it recently signed deals with two financial service providers in Denmark and Vietnam, a social gaming company in Japan, Aon to sponsor its practice gear, and a slew of others.Continue reading...

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Professional sports teams have such cachet with a certain block of the public that pretty much anything they do can find sponsorship. Aon and Manchester United just signed a sponsorship deal that has the British multinational risk-management, insurance and consulting company putting its name on the team’s training facilities for the next eight years.

Along with that, Aon’s name will also grace the training shirts of the ManU players and be attached to any of the team’s pre-season tours during the next eight seasons, such as “Tour 2013 presented by Aon in Asia Pacific.” If that weren’t enough, Manchester United’s business network will also use Aon for its “talent development, health, risk management, retirement and data & analytics.”Continue reading...

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General Motors is sticking with its pledge not to advertise during this year's Super Bowl, interim CMO Alan Batey told brandchannel. But the automaker's VP of U.S. sales, service and global marketing declined to rule out an advertising kick-off of the Chevrolet brand's new tag line, "Find New Roads," during TV spots before or after the Big Game on February 3 on CBS.

And in the meantime, Batey and Chevrolet do have their own huge moment to share with the world: sponsorship of Sunday's football (as in soccer) match between the Manchester United team and Liverpool in the U.K., which Batey said would fetch a global TV audience that could be much larger than the worldwide draw for the Super Bowl.

"This platform is huge for us, and it's really only the beginning of our relationship" with Manchester United, Liverpool and the Barclays Premier League, Batey said. "It will be a huge part of creating awareness for Chevy around the world." And taking advantage of — as well as boosting — Chevy's increasingly global platform is one main reason for the new "Find New Roads" positioning, which is replacing the lackluster "Chevy Runs Deep."Continue reading...

It's nice to be the world's most popular soccer team.

Footie powerhouse Manchester United, which is currently undefeated and in first place in both the English Premier League and its Champions League grouping, is starting to really flex its financial muscle to score a premium for its brand. ManU listed itself on the New York Stock Exchange back in August and it has been extremely busy in its first quarter. The team’s massive debt load dropped 18% down to $570 million, the AP reports. ManU also had a big influx of cash recently from an agreement with Comcast to broadcast all of its games in the United States over the next three seasons for $250 million, which is much better than the deal worth $80 million for three years that the team just had with Fox, which reaches fewer American homes than Comcast.

The club signed 10 new sponsorships during the quarter, according to SeekingAlpha.com. One new deal was with the largest telecommunications company in Azerbaijan, Bakcell, which will allow more than 2.5 million consumers to watch ManchesterUnitedTV there during the next three years. And if you’re looking for the team’s official soft drink in Japan, look no further than fruit and veggie drink specialist Kagome. The most notable deal, though, was a pre-IPO arrangement with General Motors, which agreed to pay $559 million to have Chevrolet’s logo grace the front of the team’s jerseys.

The team also just broke up with a sponsor, DHL, which had agreed to pay $65 million to place its logo on the team’s practice jerseys. Now its management team is eager to wring more cash from uniform supplier (home and away) Nike, which gets to push its swoosh next to jersey sponsor AON as part of a 13-year, £303m ($480.3 million) contract with ManU that ends in 2015. That’s a measly $36.9 million a year!Continue reading...