Shirt sponsorship in UK football appears at every level from a plumber's logo on a Sunday morning U11 kit to the Standard Chartered logo on Liverpool's Premier League shirt. Shirt sponsorship is a commercial arrangement in which a business pays for the right to place its logo on a team's playing shirt for an agreed timeframe, and the costs scale from a few hundred pounds to tens of millions while the underlying principle stays the same. This guide covers how shirt sponsorship works, what it costs at each level, and how UK businesses of any size approach the grassroots opportunity through Kit Funder. It sits alongside our complete UK guide to grassroots football sponsorship.
What is shirt sponsorship
Shirt sponsorship is the practice of a business paying a football club or team for the right to display its brand on the team's playing shirt, usually front-of-chest, for a defined period, typically a season at grassroots level and multiple seasons at professional level. Depending on the deal, the sponsor's visibility can extend to training kit, matchday programmes, and digital channels. It is the single most visible form of sports sponsorship, since the logo appears in every photograph, every broadcast frame, and every set of eyes at the ground for as long as the shirt is worn.
The five levels of football shirt sponsorship
Shirt sponsorship in English football runs across five broad tiers, and the cost rises with each step up. Grassroots sits at the base: youth and adult amateur teams, ordinarily funded by local businesses paying a few hundred pounds a season. Semi-professional and non-league football sits above this, where clubs sell shirt sponsorship to regional businesses for a few thousand pounds. League Two and League One make up the third tier, where crowds run into the low thousands and shirt deals reach tens of thousands of pounds. The Championship forms the fourth tier, where established regional and national brands pay six figures for front-of-shirt rights. The Premier League sits at the top, where global brands pay tens of millions of pounds a year for a shirt seen by hundreds of millions of viewers across a season.
What shirt sponsorship costs at each level
The cost rises every step up the five tiers, from a few hundred pounds at grassroots level to tens of millions of pounds for Premier League shirt sponsorship.
At grassroots level, a full football kit sponsorship typically costs £500 to £2,000, depending on the squad size and whether training kit is included. Through Kit Funder, a full sixteen-player match kit costs £630, covering shirts, shorts, and socks for the season, with training kit sponsorship an opt-in addition at £1,124. A local independent business, a builder, a family restaurant, a solicitor, is the typical grassroots sponsor. Clubs unable to secure a paying sponsor at all have another option, covered in our guide to how to get free football kit for your grassroots team.
At semi-professional and non-league level, no reliable published figure exists for shirt sponsorship specifically. Clubs typically report sponsorship as one combined figure covering shirt, perimeter boards, programme, and matchday income together, rather than breaking out shirt rights on their own, and no consistent, sourceable range for the shirt component alone is publicly available. What is clear is the pricing sits well above grassroots level and well below League One and League Two.
League One and League Two front-of-shirt values are not routinely published either, and the closest comparable figures available are for perimeter and LED advertising, a related but separate product from shirt sponsorship. Season-long perimeter and LED packages start from around £3,000 in League Two and rise to around £8,000 at well-supported League One clubs, which gives a sense of scale at this tier even though it is not a shirt-sponsorship figure specifically.
A single published figure for a typical current Championship front-of-shirt deal is hard to find, since clubs at this level do not routinely disclose sponsorship values. The clearest published examples relate to clubs since promoted or relegated out of the division, so are not included here as current benchmarks. As a broad guide, Championship front-of-shirt deals for less prominent clubs have historically sat in the low-to-mid six figures, well above League One and Two and well below the Premier League.
Premier League shirt sponsorship runs into eight figures at the biggest clubs. Liverpool's current front-of-shirt deal with Standard Chartered, in place since 2010, is worth around £50m a season. The figure is set to rise sharply: Turkish Airlines takes over as Liverpool's front-of-shirt sponsor from the 2027-28 season in a five-year, £300m deal worth more than £60m a season, which Liverpool describe as the most valuable front-of-shirt-only commercial agreement in Premier League history, since the larger Arsenal-Emirates and Manchester City-Etihad deals also include stadium naming rights. Manchester United's combined front-of-shirt and sleeve sponsorship is valued at around £76m, according to The Sponsor's 2026 Fair Market Value Index, and Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester City are each valued above £50m on the same index. Bournemouth's front-of-shirt deal is valued at an estimated £7.3m, illustrating the range even within the same league.
How shirt sponsorship deals are structured
A shirt sponsorship agreement sets out the term (a single season is standard at grassroots level, while professional deals typically run three to five years or longer), the deliverables (logo placement, size, and position, plus any additional rights such as matchday programme mentions or digital coverage), and whether the arrangement is exclusive to one sponsor or shared across multiple logo positions on the shirt. Professional deals also typically include category exclusivity, meaning the club agrees not to sign a second sponsor from a directly competing sector for the length of the deal. Grassroots agreements are simpler: an agreed price, a season's term, and a defined logo position, usually confirmed in a short written agreement rather than a lengthy commercial contract.
Where the sponsor logo is positioned on the shirt
Front-of-chest is the primary and most valuable position at every level, since it is visible in every photograph and every piece of broadcast or social media coverage. The sleeve is the second most valuable position, established as a distinct, separately sold sponsorship slot at Premier League level (Manchester United's sleeve deal alone is valued in excess of £20 million) and increasingly offered as a secondary position at grassroots and semi-professional level too. Back-of-shirt space sits below the player number and is rarely sold as prominent sponsorship, since it is obscured during play and photographed far less often than the front. Shorts sponsorship exists as a further, lower-value position some clubs sell separately, giving a second, smaller sponsor a presence without competing with the shirt front.
What businesses get from shirt sponsorship at each level
At every level, a shirt sponsor buys the same core return: repeated visual exposure to an engaged, attentive audience for the length of the deal. What differs is the audience's size and nature. A grassroots sponsor reaches a small, hyper-local, highly trusted audience of parents, players, and the surrounding community. A Premier League sponsor reaches a global broadcast audience running into hundreds of millions across a season, at a cost only making commercial sense at the scale of a multinational brand's marketing budget. Both are shirt sponsorship. Both buy visibility. The economics simply operate at different scales.
Women's and girls' shirt sponsorship
Women's and girls' shirt sponsorship is a fast-growing category in its own right, at both professional and grassroots level. Most Women's Super League clubs share a front-of-shirt sponsor with their men's team, so a value specific to the women's side is rarely published separately. London City Lionesses broke this pattern with a standalone Nike front-of-shirt deal reportedly worth more than £3m a year, described by the club's owner as the biggest shirt deal in women's football.
Starling Bank runs a grassroots shirt sponsorship scheme, subsidising the cost for local businesses to appear on the front of grassroots women's and girls' shirts across roughly 32,000 kit sets. Just Eat is front-of-shirt sponsor for 101 women's grassroots teams set up under its campaign marking 101 years since the FA's 1921 ban on women's football, providing each team with a full branded kit. Through Kit Funder, a girls' or women's team's full match kit costs £630, the same as a men's or boys' team, delivered in a genuine women's and girls' fit rather than a resized men's cut.
Participation in women's and girls' football is up 56% since 2020, driving rising demand for shirt sponsorship at grassroots level, and the wider commercial case is covered in our guide to women's grassroots football sponsorship.
Shirt sponsorship at grassroots specifically
At grassroots level, shirt sponsorship works through one of three routes: a direct approach to a local business, an existing relationship, or AI-matched sponsorship through a platform such as Kit Funder.
A direct approach means a club pitching a nearby business cold, with no prior connection to draw on. An existing relationship, a player's parent who runs a business, a club volunteer's contact, a neighbour's company, tends to convert fastest, since the sponsor already knows and trusts the club. AI-matched sponsorship through Kit Funder removes this dependency on personal contacts, searching for a fit based on budget, location, and audience rather than who a club happens to know. Kit Funder currently matches 1,284 clubs and community groups with sponsors, at three scales, local, regional, or national, using the same registration and matching process regardless of scale. A full match kit sponsorship costs £630 for a sixteen-player football team, fulfilled by My Club Group, and 5% of every invoice is donated to a local mental health charity, added on top of the sponsor's contribution rather than deducted from it.
How to secure a shirt sponsorship for your grassroots team
Register your team free at kitfunder.ai/teams and let the AI matching handle the search for a sponsor. If pursuing a direct approach alongside registration, identify businesses already sponsoring other local activity, write a one-page proposal stating the team, the age group, and the price, and start the conversation at least six months before the season kicks off, since kit ordered in June or July rarely arrives in time for a September start. Running Kit Funder's AI matching and a small number of warm, direct approaches in parallel produces a sponsor faster than either route alone.
For sponsorship strategy beyond the shirt itself, read our guide to how to sponsor a grassroots sports team.
Your Kit, Funded
Register your business free at kitfunder.ai. Set your budget, geography, and audience. Kit Funder matches you with a grassroots club whose shirt makes sense for your brand.
Sources
The Sponsor, 2026 Fair Market Value Index, thesponsor.com.
BBC Sport, Turkish Airlines to become Liverpool's front-of-shirt sponsor in £300m deal, bbc.co.uk.
SportsPro/Inside World Football, London City Lionesses' standalone Nike front-of-shirt deal, sportspro.com and insideworldfootball.com.
Starling Bank, Kick On with Starling grassroots kit sponsorship scheme, starlingbank.com.
Just Eat, Feed the Game / 101 campaign, justeat-101.co.uk.
Kit Funder platform data: kit sponsorship pricing and 1,284 clubs and community groups matched, correct as of August 2026, kitfunder.ai.
Common questions about shirt sponsorship
How does football shirt sponsorship work?
A business pays a club or team for the right to display its logo on the team's playing shirt, usually front-of-chest, for an agreed period. The club provides the logo placement and any additional agreed deliverables in return, and the arrangement is set out in a written agreement covering the term, the price, and what the sponsor receives.
How much does shirt sponsorship cost at grassroots level?
A grassroots football shirt sponsorship typically costs £500 to £2,000 a season, depending on squad size and whether training kit is included. Through Kit Funder, a full sixteen-player match kit costs £630, with training kit sponsorship an opt-in addition at £1,124.
How much does Premier League shirt sponsorship cost?
Premier League front-of-shirt deals run from an estimated £7.3m a year to over £60m a year at the top. Liverpool's current deal with Standard Chartered is worth around £50m a season, rising to more than £60m a season from 2027-28 under a new five-year, £300m deal with Turkish Airlines. Manchester United's combined front-of-shirt and sleeve sponsorship is valued at around £76m, and Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester City are each valued above £50m, according to The Sponsor's 2026 Fair Market Value Index.
How long do shirt sponsorship deals last?
Grassroots shirt sponsorship deals typically run one season, with renewal at the sponsor's discretion. Professional shirt sponsorship deals commonly run three to five years or longer, giving both sides stability and allowing the sponsor to build sustained brand association with the club.
How do grassroots football teams get shirt sponsors?
Grassroots teams find shirt sponsors through direct approaches to local businesses, existing relationships such as a player's parent who owns a business, or AI-matched platforms such as Kit Funder, which matches teams with sponsors across the UK without cold outreach.
