The Sponsor's 2026 FMV Index this month values Liverpool's front-of-shirt sponsorship at £61m a year. Manchester United at £57m for the front alone, plus £19m for the sleeve. Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester City each are valued above £50m.
These are the numbers Premier League sponsorship trades on. Each shirt reaches a global audience of several billion across the season. Full commercial teams on both sides negotiate the deals.
Your grassroots football team operates at the other end of the same business.
The other end of the same business
Your junior team plays around twenty league matches a year. Home matches attract forty parents from your side and a similar number from the visiting team. Total match-day audience across the full season: 1,600 people. Kit visible at training two evenings a week: another 3,200 impressions.
Contrast with Liverpool. Thirty-eight league matches, plus cup fixtures, plus European nights. Each broadcast reaches an average of 750 million viewers across the season. The Liverpool shirt reaches more people in a single Anfield match than your junior team's shirt reaches across ten years.
The audience gap is enormous as is the price and the outcome.
The kit-cost yardstick
Now compare, Premier League sponsorship values to grassroots kit costs.
A full match kit for your grassroots sqaud costs £630 through Kit Funder. Your sponsor funds this through a financial contribution.
Bournemouth's estimated £7.3m front-of-shirt deal in 2026 earns the cost of your kit every forty-five minutes across the calendar year. Liverpool's £61m earns the same amount every five minutes. Manchester United's combined front-of-shirt and sleeve deals, at around £76m, earn a grassroots kit every four minutes.
Every four minutes, a Premier League club earns your annual kit cost. Every twenty-four hours, they earn enough to kit out 360 grassroots teams like yours.
The Premier League is not merely well-funded. The Premier League runs on a different economy.
The grassroots market nobody talks about
Around 100,000 junior football teams play organised football in England. A full match kit lasts two to three seasons. Annual replacement costs total around £25m across the grassroots game. Less than half what Liverpool's front-of-shirt sponsor pays for one season of visibility.
The £25m figure includes only match kit. Add training kit, ground fees, referees, and equipment, and the grassroots football economy runs to hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Almost none of the money comes from the sponsorship market.
Grassroots kit gets paid for through player subscriptions, parent-run raffles, small local sponsorships worth a few hundred pounds each, and grant applications to the Football Foundation and Sport England. Some clubs run without any kit sponsorship at all.
Sponsorship money concentrates at the top. Kit demand sits at the bottom. Your team operates in the gap between the two every August, September, and October.
Your local sponsors
Grassroots sponsorship money does not come from national brands paying front-of-shirt rates. Your money comes from national, regional or local businesses funding one team at a time.
The typical sponsor of your grassroots football team is a small independent business with a local catchment. A regional builder. A family restaurant. A solicitor. A car dealership. Typical value: £500 to £1,500 a season. Typical decision-maker: the business owner.
Your local sponsors do not compete with the Premier League for shirt real estate. They compete for parent attention, local community goodwill, and long-term recognition in a defined catchment. Different metrics. Different value. Different economics.
Comparing Premier League sponsorship with grassroots football sponsorship as the same market is the mistake. They share a sport. Nothing else.
What this means for your club
The gap between Premier League money and grassroots need is not going to close. Broadcast rights inflation continues to concentrate wealth at the top. Community sponsorship rates stay stable in real terms.
What has changed is how you source sponsorship. Traditional outreach costs volunteer hours. AI-matched sponsorship through Kit Funder connects your club directly to local sponsors without the twenty hours of email work.
The Premier League runs on one economy. Grassroots football runs on another. Both fund the sport at different levels in different ways.
A £61m sponsorship deal represents one shirt at one club. The other 100,000 shirts at the other 99,999 clubs work on the £630 economy, not the £61m one.
The wider context on grassroots football sponsorship is covered in our complete UK guide to grassroots football sponsorship. For a shortcut through the outreach work, see our guide on how to get free football kit for your grassroots team.
Your Kit, Funded
Register your team free at kitfunder.ai/teams. If you run a business considering grassroots sponsorship, register at kitfunder.ai/brands.
