Is it time to rename the Wallabies?

Some sporting historians will point to English non-league football team Kettering Town’s deal with a local tyre firm in the mid 1970s as being the first recorded incident of a team gracing any kind of football pitch with a sponsor’s logo on their shirt.

However, this arrangement was kyboshed by the powers-that-be soon after, as sponsorship in this style was not permitted by the Football Association in those days.

Some years later, and despite my then tender years, I can clearly remember the outrage generated when Liverpool FC became the first English team to agree a deal, this time with the FA’s permission, to wear Hitachi logos across their famed red shirts.

Liverpool fans were up in arms at their club for selling off space on their heroes’ chests to the highest bidder. Even now, some die-hards look upon this as the moment when sport finally sold its soul, even though advertising hoardings had been in use around stadiums for years.

Other teams followed Liverpool’s example, safe in the knowledge that arguably the biggest team in the world at the time had ridden out the bad publicity and they could at least just claim to their fans that they wanted, or even needed, the financial advantage that Liverpool had already secured.

Since then shirt sponsorship has become ubiquitous, and part and parcel of most, if not all, sports. From the big clubs and international teams with their deals with huge brands and corporations to the lesser known clubs advertising a local company, or their chairman and benefactor’s business.

Heck, even my daughter’s under-11 soccer team take to the field each weekend with a local property developer’s logo on their shirts.

(As an aside, when my daughter joined this team I asked a few other parents what they knew of the company our beloved offspring were advertising. No-one had any idea. When I half-jokingly made the comment that I hoped they weren’t arms-dealers or peddlers of dodgy pharmaceuticals the speed in which many of my fellow parents rushed to launch internet searches on their smart phones was quite astounding.)

There have even been occasions where teams have been sponsored, not by a company known to their fans on the terraces, but to the viewing public in far-flung countries (witness Everton FC’s deal a few years ago with Chinese telco Kejian, not a brand with a high profile in the blue half of Liverpool, I would suspect).

There have been some exceptions to this; only in the past few years have Barcelona finally agreed to a shirt sponsorship deal after years of resistance. Although, given the size of their fan-base, they could probably afford the luxury of not requiring the cash.

And thanks to the financial difficulties currently miring most of the world, there have also been some recent notable instances of clubs not being able to broker a deal worth their while, and have played in quite charmingly old-fashioned logo free kits, or used the space to advertise their own products or a local charity (Spanish team Valencia could even be seen promoting the club’s Twitter account).

But it’s not always about the money. Some years ago I worked for a company in England that sponsored one of the two local football teams, the one of the two that was then in the EPL, splashing their garish bright green logo across the team’s famous blue and white halved shirts (that’s a clue to who the team is…). When my employers also approached the other local football club with an eye to sponsoring them too the offer was politely, but firmly refused.

The story that went around my workplace was that the reason for the refusal was two-fold: first, that the club didn’t want to share a sponsor with their hated rival, and secondly, the green logo would clash with their claret and blue shirts (another clue to the teams’ identities there!).

But where soccer led, other sports followed. After rugby’s switch to professionalism in the 1990s it was only a matter of time before its clubs also embraced sponsorship as a way to increase revenue to enable them to compete with other codes and with each other.

Of course, the proliferation of sponsorship is not news to anyone. As sports have become more and more money driven so too the opportunities to sell off space on player’s kits, on advertising boards around stadia, on walls and portable hoardings behind interviewees, and more recently, even stadium naming rights, have been exploited. This is now the way of the world, and without it our favourite teams and clubs would struggle to survive. I would imagine that only the most vociferous left-wing fans would want their club to miss out on the additional money that sponsorship brings, to allow them to take a stand against the commercialisation of the game.

But I do feel that there is one area where sponsorship should be reined in: national team naming rights.

This weekend, and as something of a neutral, having familial ties in both camps, I attended the Australia v Wales rugby international in Melbourne. Or if you’d prefer the sponsor friendly option: The Qantas Wallabies v Wales Castrol Edge international at Etihad Stadium.

Now take a look at the sponsor-driven event name again. Does anything stand out? For me, it’s the fact that the overseas opposition are simply called ‘Wales’. Not an amalgam of their major sponsor and nickname – which would be the Admiral Dragons, were they to use it. They are probably never likely to do this, as the fans wouldn’t stand for it.

And while no-one in the real world is likely to refer to the national rugby team by their airline moniker, the constant references to ‘The/Your Qantas Wallabies’ by the stadium announcers and across the media is just plain embarrassing!

I understand that deals to display corporate logos on kits are here to stay, and that the ARU doesn’t have the financial muscle to stand on its own to compete with South Africa and New Zealand where rugby is king, without the help of sponsors. But to sell off the national identity to the highest bidder in this manner is beyond the pale. Judging by the smirks of the Welsh fans in attendance they thought so too, as one boyo seated near me joked after one announcement “… and I thought we were playing Australia”.

As far as rugby goes, this seems to be a peculiarly Australian affliction: neither South Africa or New Zealand do it, nor four Nations new boys Argentina, none of the northern hemisphere teams do it, and even cash-strapped amateur unions in the likes of Portugal, Russia and Namibia have managed to hold on to their national names.

But it’s not just rugby though: most of Australia’s national teams run out with a selection of cringe-worthy prefixes: The Qantas Socceroos, The VB Kangaroos, and wasn’t there also a well-publicised instance when Ricky Ponting’s men were introduced to a press conference as ‘The Emirates Cricket team’?

This was a reference to their being sponsored by the airline, but clearly no-one thought to point out at the time that the Emirates already have their own national cricket team. And Ricky Ponting is not the captain.

So why the practice of abandoning the name Australia for international teams and their fixtures? The deal to rename the national team as ‘The Qantas Wallabies’ must have netted the ARU a fortune, but is it justifiable?

If Qantas, or any other corporation once the current affiliation ends, want to sponsor the national team then so be it, but why the need to go that bit further and have naming rights too, when, for example, Admiral don’t dictate the same for the Welsh?