On August 18, 2008, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) signed a five-year sponsorship deal with Manchester United (MU). The sponsorship deal is estimated to be worth 10 million GBP (Hassan, August 2008). Sponsorship of teams and sporting events is hugely popular with a number of sponsors paying considerable money to be associated with the event. The whole concept behind sports sponsorship is that by associating with a popular sportsman, sports or sports event, the sponsor stands to gain publicity, advertisement and some amount of brand image transfer. However, in the case of STC sponsoring MU, several issues and questions have not been logically answered. STC operates extensively only in Saudi Arabia where it has a very good brand identity. It does not have business operations in UK and other nations of Europe.

Therefore, the direct brand identity benefits that STC can hope to achieve is not very clear. MU is one of the most popular football clubs of UK and it is well known among other nations. However, it is already has 25 other sponsors and some of them include AON, Tri Indonesia, PCCW, GLOBACOM and many others (MU Sponsors, 2011). It is not clear yet how much visibility and brand recall STC will get among all these sponsors. The dissertation will examine this main theme and explore the influence of sport sponsorship on the sponsor’s customer-brand relationship.