Man U chases Chevy’s dollars

US auto maker Chevrolet blew away all the competition, which I understand was pretty significant, to offer Manchester United a 7-year shirt sponsorship deal including signing up fees and inflation worth around £50m a year. My company Aon currently pays £20m, and I understand were more than willing to negotiate a higher rate, but along with other interested parties were massively outbid by Chevy owner General Motors.

Within hours of the deal becoming public the man that negotiated the deal at Chevrolet, Joel Ewanick was fired.

I remember at Aon a lot of questions were asked 3 years ago as the CEO signed a 4-year deal with United worth £80m, but two years into that arrangement even the most staunchiest of Man U haters within our company would accept that it has done a lot for the global branding of our business and its been a fruitful partnership.

Aon will continue beyond 2014 partnering United as title sponsor of the club’s business-to-business network, an interesting myriad of multinational sponsors, global execs and heads of state plus their high profile community engagement programmes, specifically the Manchester United Foundation.

Chevrolet’s deal doesn’t start until 2014/15 as Aon has two more seasons to run, but it is reported that Chevrolet have already paid a large sum of the money up front. Man United’s quest to whore themselves out for every dollar shows no signs of abating does it?

The previous highest shirt deal was Barcelona’s annual £25m contract with the Qatar Foundation. Bayern Munich are paid £23.6m by Deutsche Telekom and Liverpool (Standard Chartered), Man City (Eithad Airways) and Sunderland (Invest in Africa) all get paid £20m a year.

For what it’s worth Charlton’s deal with the Andrew Sykes Group is said to be around £450,000.