Premier League shirt sponsors unveiled
We asked if you could name all 20 Premier League sponsors. Here are the answers... how did you do?
Now the bigger question: what the juddering eff do half of those companies do? Some are more obvious than others, like consumer electronic giants Samsung (Chelsea), paintmakers Crown (Blackburn) and brewers Chang (Everton). Arsenal's Emirates and Manchester City's Etihad are airlines.
188BET (Bolton and Wigan), SBOBET (West Ham) and Sportingbet (Wolves) are all online bookies. Sunderland's Tombola is, reasonably enough, an online bingo company. And West Brom's Homeserve serve your home with emergency repairs.
Others are less obvious, to the point where we still don't quite know what they are even after having it patiently explained to us. Spurs' league sponsors Autonomy is apparently an enterprise software company "using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods". We think they mean they're in IT.
What they're not in, unlike almost half of the EPL sponsors, is financial services â an umbrella term covering much of the groiund around where banking used to be. F&C (Birmingham) are an investment-based 'asset management' company, while Blackpool's rather less high-falutin' Wonga.com dole out short-term loans. Liverpool's Standard Chartered is a 'financial services' multinational formed by the merger of two banks. Stoke's Britannia was a building society until it merged with the Co-Op in 2008 â it now provides those ever-trendy 'financial services'.
Manchester United's Aon provide risk management and insurance, so perhaps they should have advised previous Red Devils sponsor AIG, another insurance outfit who suddenly found themselves in a "liquidity crisis" (ie skint). Speaking of which, Newcastle sponsors Northern Rock is now a nationalised bank owned by the UK taxpayer.
And finally, FxPro (Villa and Fulham) is an online retail trading broker â so a bit like gambling, then, except presumably if the bookmaking industry went under you wouldn't get your wager money back from the taxpayer's pocket...
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