Serving the Teesside Business Community | 19
The Business Buzz
With award-winning
writer Harry Pearson
John Elliott, chairman of Newton Aycliffe
firm Ebac, is well-known in non-league
circles for manufacturing washing
machines, mainly through his association
with the Northern League.
B
ack in the 1970s my father met
the chairman of a Football League
club. Having heard no end of abuse
directed at then Middlesbrough FC
chairman Charlie Amer, my dad asked the
man why he wanted to take on such an
apparently thankless role.
“Well,” the man responded. “Think about
it – there are 650 MPs, over 800 members
of the House of Lords, but there are only
92 Football League chairmen. It is the most
exclusive club in the country.” He smiled:
“Contacts, son, contacts.”
The type of contacts it brought in those
days would have been very different from
the ones you might expect today. Back then
the chairmen and owners of Football League
clubs were quite a different type of man (and
they were all men, I regret to say). Most of
them ran moderately-sized local businesses.
These days oligarchs and billionaires
predominate. Manchester City is owned
by members of the Abu Dhabi royal family
(estimated wealth $23bn), but for most
of the 1970s the club was controlled by
Peter Swales who had a chain of TV rental
premises in Manchester. Burnley, one of
England’s great sides, was the personal
fiefdom of Bob Lord who owned 14
Lancashire butcher’s shops. Louis Edwards
who controlled Manchester United was also
a butcher and pie-maker.
There’s no doubt that in the ‘70s, if you
wanted cheap pork chops, or a portable
black-and-white for the bedroom, Football
League chairmen could help. If it was first
class travel to a deluxe Far Eastern resort,
Global rise of the
shirt sponsor
well, you were probably talking about a
luxury coach to Lowestoft.
These days top flight English football
attracts a global audience. In terms of
establishing brand awareness sponsors could
hardly do better. So while there are a few
chairmen like Boro’s brilliant Steve Gibson,
genuine fans who recognise the important
social function a football club has within the
local community and act accordingly, there
are others for whom football is simply a
promotional opportunity.
Indeed, it’s rumoured the owner of one
Premier League side bought it after he’d
worked out it was cheaper to do that and
plaster the name of his business all over the
stadium, than it was to pay for the equivalent
amount of TV advertising.
On a smaller scale the same is true.
Like most North-East fans of non-league
football I’m aware of the fact that Ebac from
Newton Aycliffe is the only company that
manufactures washing machines in the UK,
and that’s solely because Ebac sponsor the
Northern League (and Newton Aycliffe!).
Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, football even
at the highest level didn’t have much reach
beyond the local community. You can tell
that by looking at old football programmes.
In the Boro programmes from that era
one of the main types of advertiser were
cafes. The Emporium Café offered ‘Meals
with a difference’, while Spark’s Trocadero
promised ‘Good food, quick service (open
till 6pm)’. This seems rather upmarket and
sophisticated though compared to the efforts
of a place called Garasheds which boasted
of ‘A comprehensive display of garages,
greenhouses, garden sheds and coal
bunkers’ (Yes, I know, the Swinging Sixties,
crazy times!).
In those days the nearest Boro’s matchday
magazine came to promoting an international
brand was when it proclaimed ‘At the end
of the day, the fans all say, a Magnet Ale for
me!’. Magnet Ale was made in Tadcaster.
It says something about the way big
business’ relationship with English football
has changed if you recall that when shirt
sponsorship was introduced in 1979 many
top flight clubs struggled to find anyone
willing to pay for it.
These days you’ll find the names of
businesses from all across the world on
English club shirts, whether that’s Philippines
bookmaker Dafabet or Chang beer from
Thailand.
Hard to believe that In the 1980s West
Bromwich Albion – a team that boasted stars
such as future Boro boss Bryan Robson –
couldn’t find a shirt sponsor at all and ran out
each week with a big ‘no smoking’ sign on
their shirts instead.