Football rights holders are risking the long-term value of their most premium advertising inventory by embracing digital overlays, according to a leading sports strategist.
In the 2024/2025 season, the combined value of sponsorship deals across Premier League clubs exceeded $1.5bn, spanning shirt sponsorships, secondary partnerships and pitch-side advertising. The latter is the oldest form of football advertising, debuting in 1966. Some things may have changed, from painted plywood to digital billboards, but the principle of offering brands the chance to be directly involved in the action remains the same.
That exposure comes at a steep price. Precise figures are hard to isolate because clubs bundle inventory into wider deals, but marketing agency The Bank estimates that boards at a lower-table Premier League club cost around £2,500 per minute. That figure can rise to £15,000 per minute when a match is broadcast live, with top clubs able to charge much more.
Alex Wilson, a strategist who has worked with leading brands, argues that the value of these placements is a form of ‘costly signalling’, a concept from evolutionary psychology which suggests that hard-to-fake, inefficient signals communicate strength and legitimacy precisely because they are expensive.
‘On a subconscious level audiences go, “Well, that clearly cost a lot of money. Not anyone can afford to do that”, so therefore they must be a very big, very serious company. It’s buying trust and legitimacy.’
But that signal is being undermined by the growing use of digital overlays, according to Wilson. The technology, which has become standard across top clubs, allows rights holders to digitally replace pitch-side ads in broadcast feeds, meaning different television audiences see different brands occupying the same physical space.
‘By taking those really big expensive placements, then slicing them up into smaller ones and selling them at a lower rate, they’re essentially trying to trick TV viewers,’ says Wilson. ‘It’s built purely on viewers thinking that this company really is pitch-side at a Premier League game.’
That illusion may be beginning to fracture. Social media users have become especially savvy, and clips circulate that highlight inconsistencies. And as fans become more aware of these glitches, the premium attached to pitch-side advertising is at risk of collapsing.
Wilson said: ‘If TV audiences stop trusting the pitch side ads that they see on the screen are actually at the stadium, the value of those placements totally goes through the floor because you’re killing the premium of what they’re paying for in the first place.
‘And what the industry will have collectively done is take some of the most valuable unique media placements in the world and basically turn them into something that’s as valuable as a website popup or a YouTube pre-roll’.
It’s important to note that Wilson does not have data to point to, but the logic of his argument is clear. He argues that rights holders have a limited window to reverse course, to ‘put the genie back in the bottle’. But digital overlays are not the only issue with the game. Wilson believes the broader presentation of football has become increasingly hostile to viewers, driven by ‘badly designed, overstimulating, blingy adverts’ that give the sport the look of ‘low-rent porn’.
As a contrast, he points to a surprising role model: American football. Despite its reputation as one of the most overly commercialised sports, he argues that it is one of the few that understands how to protect its core product.
He said: ‘Ads in an NFL game in 2026 are significantly less invasive than the ads in a Premier League football game. What the NFL gets really well is that people are paying for the sport, and so the quality of that needs to stay really high for the ads to have value. There’s no digital overlays. There’s no ads in the background*.’
The distinction lies in whether advertising is built around the sport, or whether it has been reduced to a surface for advertising.
‘If you went to a cinema or if you went to a theatre show, you would never see someone put cartwheeling lights at the side of it going “buy this, buy this, buy this”. Because the whole point is your focus should be on the thing that you’re paying to watch.’
As Wilson sees it, football broadcasters and rights holders are charging premium prices but not delivering a premium service. The ‘dashboard brain thinking’ of modern sports marketing, where performance metrics and optimisation take precedence over protecting the long-term value of the product.
Wilson said: ‘The industry is so focused on measuring the numbers, the metrics that it has on the dashboard and not thinking more holistically about what matters. Brands should ask fans what ads they saw, what they can recall and what they liked. That is far more useful than going, “Oh, we had 50 million people that had exposure to our logo in the Premier League.”
‘I think sports marketing in general needs to think much more about what actually matters.’
*Some might argue that, with 18-20 commercial breaks each game, the NFL can afford to be a bit more stringent with its formats
Main image by Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
