The impact of sponsoring a professional cycling team on the company, with a case study of a Belgian professional cycling team "Intermarché Wanty Gobert".

Details

Supervisors

Chevalier, Ludovic

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

This thesis was carried out with the aim of studying corporate sports sponsorship in professional cycling in order to identify the objectives, expectations, impacts, methods and returns of such partnerships. In order to make this work more concrete, we decided to focus on one professional cycling team in particular, namely Intermarché Wanty Gobert. We conducted in-depth interviews with each of the three title sponsors of the cycling team, respectively Intermarché, Wanty and Groupe Gobert in order to learn more about the objectives sought by each company through this sponsorship. However, this thesis also relies on quantitative analysis as we were able to access the results of research conducted by Nielsen Sports, the world's leading source of sports measurement and analysis, to assess the sponsorship performance of each of the three title sponsors. Through our research and analysis, we found that sponsoring a cycling team offers high visibility as teams take on the names of sponsors directly through co-naming. However, this is not the only impact of such a practice and the main objectives sought by each of the three sponsors are different depending on the expectations and activities of the companies.