Shirt sponsorship was fought by the broadcasters

Television refused to show sponsored kits for years, and the standoff decided who controls the money in modern sport.

A club signs a deal, puts a company name across the chest, and the broadcaster announces it will not televise the match unless the shirts are changed. Clubs kept two sets of kit, one for the cameras and one for everyone else. This happened, in England and elsewhere, well into the 1980s.

The broadcasters had a coherent case, which people forget. A public service broadcaster funded by licence money was not going to hand a company free advertising in the middle of a programme it had paid to cover, and once you allow one logo you have no principled place to stop. The alternative, they argued, was that every frame of sport becomes billable space.

They were right about the trajectory and they lost anyway, and the reason they lost is the whole story of modern sport. Clubs discovered they had the scarce asset. There is one league, and there were increasingly many channels, and a broadcaster that refuses to show the football is a broadcaster with no football. The moment competition arrived in television, the ban became unenforceable, and it collapsed quickly.

What followed was not a gradual filling of empty space. It was a redefinition of what a kit is. Front sponsor, then sleeve, then shorts, then a training kit with a different sponsor, then a warm-up top with a third. The shirt stopped being a uniform and became a rate card, which is why replica shirts are redesigned annually and why the club crest keeps shrinking.

I have no interest in the aesthetic complaint, which is usually nostalgia with a haircut. The real cost is elsewhere. Sponsorship income arrives in proportion to global audience, so it flows to the same twenty clubs everywhere, and it is the least redistributed revenue in the sport. Gate money is local. Broadcast money is at least partly pooled by the league. Sponsorship is pooled by nobody.

The broadcasters were not defending taste. They were defending their share, and when they lost it they stopped arguing and started buying.

Look at a shirt from 1975 and what strikes you is not the plainness. It is that nobody had yet worked out the space was for sale.