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Over the past several years, growth in sponsorship spending has surpassed that of traditional marketing and promotional approaches, as it has become an indispensable part of the marketing mix. Yet, despite considerable advances in the application of analytics across the sport industry, sponsorship revenue forecasting still largely relies on a decades-old methodology. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This research seeks to assist sport organizations by applying more advanced survival analysis methodologies to the study of shirt sponsorships of football clubs, utilizing more than 300 sponsorships of every team that has competed in the English Premier League (EPL) over the past 25 years.

The analysis of the lifetimes of shirt sponsorships provides several insights for those employed by European football clubs and tasked with managing these increasingly lucrative sponsorships. Notably, tests confirmed that survivor functions of EPL shirt sponsorships are significantly different than those that appeared solely in English Football League (EFL) Championship play. In addition, results found that the median lifetimes of shirt sponsorships of EPL clubs were more than one year longer, when compared to EFL clubs.

This research marks the first attempt in the literature to apply survival analysis methods to describe the lifetimes of European football shirt sponsorships. The results provide empirical evidence that the potential effects of promotion or relegation could have consequences for football clubs in the tens of millions of dollars, and illustrate the importance of providing those tasked with managing such partnerships with more advanced methodologies to assist in the organization’s sponsorship revenue forecasting activities.

While numerous studies have investigated the returns firms receive for their investments in sponsorship, no study to date has examined the potential for organizational performance to contribute to the continuance of business to business (B2B) relationships. Thus, this study aims to illuminate B2B sponsorship relationships in isolating whether firm decision-makers are like fair-weathered fans, in that they are more likely to stick with successful organizations.

An advanced quantitative modeling approach, survival analysis, is applied to a data set of more than 350 sponsorships to isolate the impact of performance on B2B decision-making.

Even after controlling for several potentially confounding variables, results indicate that every point per game earned by English football clubs decreases the probability of the sponsoring firm exiting the agreement by 54.4%.

These findings provide empirical evidence of the impact of the sponsored organization’s performance to influence B2B firm decision-making, a novel finding yet to be confirmed in the sponsorship-linked marketing literature.