LONDON (AP)—England’s Premier League could be looking for a new sponsor in 2010 after Barclays bank began a review of its worldwide sports deals.
Britain’s third largest bank has held naming rights to the league since 2001 but its current three-year, $101 million deal ends at the end of the 2009-10 season.
Libby Chambers, Barclays’ global retail and commercial banking chief marketing officer, said the sponsorship has raised the bank’s profile greatly worldwide but that doesn’t mean that soccer and other sponsorship agreements are exempt from the review.
“We always closely evaluate them to ensure they continue to provide value to our business,” she said in a statement given to The Associated Press. “We are only halfway through our current sponsorship, which runs well into 2010, and therefore have not started discussions about renewal.”
The bank agreed in June to sponsor the ATP’s season-ending tennis championship at about $7 million per year for the next five years. The tournament is moving from Shanghai to London in 2009. Barclays also sponsors golf’s Scottish Open and Singapore Open, the Dubai Championships tennis tournament and rugby’s Churchill Cup.
But like other banks, Barclays has been hit by the global credit crisis. Its shareholders last month voted in favor of a plan to raise $10.5 billion in a deal that gives Middle Eastern investors a 32 percent stake in the bank.
Barclays opted to raise the money from investors in Abu Dhabi and Qatar rather than take part in a government bailout plan for the banking industry.
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