Although we don't know exactly how much Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo or Mbappé earn for an advertisement, we can assume that it is a stratospheric figure, and that even with money in hand it is not easy to get it unless there is will or interest on the part of the footballers. In addition, they already have multimillion-dollar contracts with the biggest sportswear brands, so getting them to wear a shirt with a logo other than the one sponsored by their club is little less than impossible. But Burger King, in a textbook example of covert marketing focused on electronic sports or eSports, managed to get not only one of these big stars to wear its brand, but all of them. Thanks to FIFA and a "creative" use of sports sponsorships and promotion through gaming platforms.
An account dedicated to esports marketing analysis details the maneuver in an educational and illustrative way. Burger King, as a powerful multinational that it is, could spend the coo means in company money to display its brand on a prestigious international club, which guarantees it to appear in prime-time matches, but that costs another million - Fly Emirates pays 70 million per season to display its logo on Real Madrid. Instead, Burger King chose Stevenage FC, a club in the lower part of the English fourth division, whose sponsorship is surely radically cheaper.
Videocaso – Stevenage Burgerking – Esports Marketing
From fourth division to heaven
And why would a multinational with thousands of restaurants in 100 countries around the world want to display its brand on a fourth division English club? Easy, because that club will not play in the Champions League or the Premier League, but it is present in FIFA and that means that there is a shirt with the burger chain's logo clearly visible in the game. First step.
Once the Trojan horse is in place, the second part of the plan comes. Very few players would normally use Stevenage in FIFA, a League Two team from a modest city in the south-east of England that is not even among the 200 most populated in the country. But that's where Burger King's marketing team comes in: offering incentives such as free food to participants through The Stevenage Challenge , inviting players to take on various challenges and share them on social media.
The pull effect and the small incentive have a huge effect: tens of thousands of players choosing Stevenage for their career mode, signing the best players on the market and sharing stellar moments with them on their social media accounts, with the Burger King logo clearly visible and in a world where streaming, esports and the huge growth of the digital world means that the company has achieved an incalculable brand presence, linked to the biggest stars in world football and for a tiny fraction of what a similar sponsorship would cost using the traditional method. It is no coincidence that of all the teams in the world, Stevenage is the most used in the career mode in the game and that its physical shirts sell at a rate that is not typical for a club in its division in England. A great example of creativity that allowed them to achieve a lot, with a relatively minimal investment.