Advertising and Sponsorship Agreements:

Broadly speaking, advertising (or marketing) is a way of communicating the sporting club’s facilities and activities to attract new members, new funds and new resources to the club. Advertising for your sporting club could be something simple like placing an advertisement in the local newspaper or something a little more complex like marketing your sporting club online. The main purpose of marketing and advertising is to focus on your members and to tailor and project your activities and functions to meet the demand of your club members.

For basic advertising promotions, generally there may not be a need for you to have a marketing or advertising agreements in place. However, if you are conducting a major advertising promotion, it may be beneficial for you to set in place formal marketing agreements or legal obligations or to receive legal advice from our Sport Lawyers so that you are aware of what your legal commitments are.

The bigger your sporting club, the more it generally costs to run. Many larger sporting associations depend on outside funding to support their activities and in some cases support the wages or financial obligations to them. Broadly speaking, sponsorship is where an outside business provides resources, services or funds to the sporting club, in return for a commercial benefit to the business. This benefit to the business may be in the form of naming rights, advertising rights or some other advantage that the business may benefit from.  

Generally, where a business is proposing to sponsor your club, it is advisable that you have a Sponsorship Agreement or other formal legal arrangements in place. The purpose of a Sponsorship Agreement is to set out both your rights and the sponsor businesses’ rights under the sponsorship agreement. A sponsorship agreement can be as simple as a verbal or ‘handshake’ agreement for the supply of sausages for one of the clubs’ weekend events, or it can be a complex written agreement for the naming rights of your clubs teams and fields.

In general, the best type of sponsorship agreement is a written one. A written agreement aids to ensure that the rights and obligations of both parties are set out and can be enforced if necessary.

Over the years, we have helped draft a number of complex agreements for a wide range of clients and in a broad type of matters and our experienced Sydney Sports and Associations Lawyers can assist you in drafting your sponsorship or advertising in a way that seeks to ensure that your club’s position is protected. Our sports and association lawyers have been providing legal advice to sport and association law clients for over a decade and have the experience to assist you with a wide variety of sport law enquiries.