Football championships and jersey sponsors’ stock prices: an empirical investigation

Abstract

Corporate sports sponsorship is an important part of many companies’ corporate communication strategy. In this paper, we take the example of major football tournaments to show that sponsorship indeed affects the sponsor's (stock) market value. We find a statistically significant impact of football results (at an individual match level) of the seven most important football nations at European and World Championships on the stock prices of jersey sponsors. In general, the more important a match and the less expected its result, the higher its impact. In addition, we find a form of ‘mere-exposure’ effect which is difficult to reconcile with the efficient markets hypothesis.