Chelsea’s new shirt sponsor spying infinite opportunities in the Premier League

Charlie Ebersol, as a successful businessman, is used to his everyday life being interrupted by the trill of his phone. But, even in that context, it has been ringing off the metaphorical hook over the past few weeks.

“There are people I have not spoken to in years who are now suddenly calling me saying, ‘I am a huge Chelsea fan, I fly to London every year to watch them play. We have to catch up!’,” says the technology entrepreneur. “And I’m thinking, ‘You didn’t ring for 15 years and now you call?’. I just had to be behind the company that is the front-of-shirt sponsor for you to get back in touch… got it.”

Ebersol says all this with a smile. He knows this is a big deal for a lot of people and not just because it is costing the in-game analysis company he founded, Infinite Athlete, worn by the men’s, women’s and academy teams.

It is rare for a sponsorship to generate much interest in football, but the name blazoned across the front of Chelsea’s shirt — or, on occasion, the absence of one — has actually been a bit of a story for the past 19 months.

It began when the previous sponsor, Three, suspended its deal with Chelsea when former owner Roman Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK government in March last year in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The company wanted its logo taken off until the ownership issue was resolved — the Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium took over two months later — although that demand was never actioned upon.

Still, Three’s stance did not go down well with the club’s fans and there was an unusual measure of delight when the mobile telephone company’s agreement came to an end after the 2022-23 campaign.

Its departure left the new hierarchy, after a troubled first season at the helm as Chelsea failed to qualify for European competition for only the second time this century, with another problem to resolve.

An agreement with Paramount+ was vetoed by the Premier League in June over concerns it could cause problems with the league’s broadcast partners. Discussions with gambling company Stake.com were then called off after supporters made it clear they did not want to be associated so closely with a betting firm. Talks were held, too, with Saudi state airline Riyadh Air over a potential deal.

Ebersol had begun talking with co-owners Behdad Eghbali and Boehly a year earlier as they explored using his company, Tempus Ex Machina — which provided data stream consolidation, data visualisation and integrated player tracking technology to clubs and leagues in various sports — to improve what is on offer for Chelsea fans when watching games on the club’s Fifth Stand app.

A seven-year partnership was announced in April, but it was only when the three men were all together at the Kenan Memorial Stadium, North Carolina, watching Chelsea’s first pre-season friendly against Wrexham in July that the idea of an official sponsorship was mooted.

Within days, an agreement was reached, but, like the aborted Paramount+ deal, it needed clearance from the Premier League.

For those on the outside looking in, suspicion abounded. Rivals had watched Chelsea sell fringe players to clubs in Saudi Arabia over the summer prompting murmurings — rejected by Chelsea — over Clearlake’s links to the Public Investment Fund, Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund. Plenty of the uncertainty stemmed from where exactly Infinite Athlete had sprung. The company was only launched in August. How could it afford such a high fee from the outset?

But the new brand had actually been created when Tempus Ex Machina acquired the biomechanical analytics firm Biocore LLC. Infinite Athlete may have appeared new to the scene, but it was actually two companies formed in 2019 and 2009 respectively coming together.

Regardless, the Premier League has a process in place and it was Ebersol’s task to earn its approval. It took until September 30, over two months after Chelsea and Ebersol had agreed terms, for the green light to come.

“My mother (television and film actress Susan Saint James) told me when I was growing up that, ‘Everything works out in the end — and if it hasn’t worked out, it is not the end’,” says Ebersol. “It did not hurt that while waiting, people were asking the question: ‘What is Infinite Athlete?’. After all, that is what sponsorship is about. To get noticed and for people to learn. So there was a benefit to this taking time.

“If I was 10-20 years younger, maybe I would have got more worked up. Now I can recognise it worked out better than I could have hoped. If we had been approved right from the get-go, it would not have been as valuable to us.”

It helped that Ebersol was already known to the Premier League. The entrepreneur and television producer had been in contact over the potential use of his firm’s technology. The 40-year-old, whose previous ventures include The Company and the Alliance of American Football, is also well known in the U.S. — his father is respected senior TV executive Dick Ebersol, who has worked in sports broadcasting for decades.

But, as the timeline suggests, those connections did not lead to any shortcuts. “We had been in touch with the Premier League before then, but we are a privately held company so nobody knew our business,” he says. “Just in the last year, we have bought multiple companies. We are an evolving business.

“I went to London a couple of times during the process to walk (the Premier League) through it. We introduced them to some of our partners, some of the investors, because — and this was really important to the Chelsea ownership, too — I did not want any aspect to be behind a closed door. We had nothing to hide. I wanted no grey areas.

“We are a very large company that’s in seven or eight countries with hundreds of employees. This is a very complicated business. The reason we are doing this deal is about teaching people what the company is about. I was happy to do it. Plus any excuse to have a full English breakfast for multiple days in a row — that’s heaven on earth for me!

“I have grown up with sports my whole life and I have never known a league to take so much care in protecting their brand, and the brand of their clubs, during this process.

“There is this notion that, for the right price, you can do anything you want. But what this process showed me was that is not the case in the Premier League. Your brand has to meet a certain threshold for them to feel comfortable about you representing this thing. That was very gratifying. I knew if I was approved that I also would not be coming up against someone else that I would not want to be associated with.”

Some might dispute that last assertion, but the protracted nature of his talks with the Premier League does suggest it was a thorough process.

One of the issues that emerged was that some of the Premier League owners count among Infinite Athlete’s investors. In that context, the fear was their money could be seen to be inadvertently helping a rival.

“Somebody at the Premier League asked me about that,” says Ebersol. “But I explained that is not how this works. My investors are $90billion (£73bn) funds. The investment in me and the clubs are one of many investments that they are making. They take it very seriously and are in it to make money, but it is not as if they have put their entire life savings into it.

“During the process, I did not talk to the press so as not to hinder what was going on. We have an internal slogan of ‘NSA’ — not screwing around. We say our investors are NSA investors. All of our investors were first investors in things like Google and Facebook, the biggest companies in the world. They are making very sober investments in what we do.

“This idea we are flippantly buying a front-of-shirt sponsorship without a plan was hilarious from our perspective.

“The outcome is I am in a much better place as a company with the Premier League and a number of other clubs… look, we are selling our products to other clubs in the Premier League and talking to others in the Championship and in Europe. So the more they know what we are doing and who we are, the better.”

Ebersol feels the opportunities that his company’s technology can provide are endless. Fans who subscribe to its app will be able to pinpoint every touch made by their favourite player. Chelsea head coach Mauricio Pochettino can view clips of what happens every time they press, say, in a specific area of the pitch. The in-game analysis will be extensive. Ebersol hopes different people will be able to watch the same game but taper how they view it to their particular needs.

So how long will the shirt sponsorship deal last? The club’s official statement only referred to the 2023-24 season.

“I had entire meetings with the Premier League where we were laying out a five-year road map of why this was valuable to us beyond just a single-year partnership,” Ebersol adds. “That’s where I think they began to understand that this was not frivolous. This was a deal of opportunity — how often are you ever going to get a chance to be the front-of-shirt sponsor at a club like Chelsea?

“It was not the only deal we were looking at, but this was the one we were most interested in because it offered us the most scope to test the market. Something we would not have been able to do, say, with just a stadium naming rights deal.

“The sponsorship partnership with Chelsea is a multi-year deal. Separately, as a company, we have a multi-year technology deal. There are also a lot of assets that will become clear over this first year of the deal that you will start to see. Our requirements are unique.

“We are not trying to sell cars or plane tickets. We are trying to ingratiate ourselves into the world of football.”