Assignment 15A - Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No.2

For this assignment, I found three local clubs which had started around 2-3 years ago in the general area of my hometown to interview and discovered far more than my previous interviews. This is hard to imagine now, especially for me, but there is a lot that I did not know which goes into starting a club.

• When it comes to getting sponsors, a lot of it depends on the national affiliate which the club joins at its inception. National affiliates are organizations presiding over clubs and each club has to join one or they cannot play against other clubs. Clubs do not have to be part of the same national affiliate to play against one another or to start tournaments, but it can make the process easier. The national affiliate which they pick then depends on the purpose of the club and which benefit they value most. Additional sponsors are then usually local ones which management of the club personally reaches out to.
• Upon discovering all of this information, my business model becomes kind of blurry or at least not as clear as it was before. I cannot start another national affiliate because the ones which currently exist take up most of the market and I am sure that the process is very difficult. I still think there exists a need for a middle man to help clubs get other sponsors; national, local, or even international ones seeking to establish a culture in a new area. 
• The clubs seem to gain sponsors on a "best available" basis that relies on those that other clubs have or the ones most readily available. Thus, I still think that there is an untapped market of businesses that would be willing to sponsor these clubs and management is simply unaware of them. There is a lot of attorney work involved in founding a club and establishing sponsorship, and transactions are usually done with the help of banks and setting up specific accounts for the club. Post-purchase evaluation is done once the club is up and running, and measured by financial and competitive success.

This segment made me push beyond the surface level of information and get to the foundations of how clubs are run and financed. It was a lot of investigating into the legal workings of soccer clubs and how simple they may seem, but are actually very tedious and (unnecessarily) complicated. A lot of decisions regarding sponsorship would also be made before my business gets involved so I would have to either convince the club of the benefits of my business, or get some sponsors interested beforehand to help influence the clubs' decisions. Overall, at tournaments especially I feel the impacts of my business can be visible as they will be more of them sponsored by more brands.