Cricket marketing · 2 min read
A procurement checklist for cricket sponsorship buyers
Help finance, legal and marketing teams compare cricket sponsorship offers on scope, total cost, delivery risk and reporting.
By Muntery Strategic
Make unlike offers comparable
Cricket sponsorship proposals can combine visibility, hospitality, content and community support in different proportions. Procurement should first establish what the business is buying and why. Comparing headline fees without comparing scope can favour a cheaper proposal that requires substantially more activation spending or provides fewer useful rights.
Create a comparison sheet containing objective, audience evidence, confirmed assets, delivery dates, exclusions and total expected cost. Label historical data and projections separately. A published package is useful background, not proof that the described inventory remains available or that another rights holder can supply equivalent benefits.
Confirm authority and restrictions
Ask the seller to confirm its authority to grant each material right. Identify category restrictions, territorial limits, approved designations and any dependencies on third parties. A club may control its own website but not competition footage, individual player endorsements or every image taken at its ground.
The ICC’s event-specific protection guidance illustrates why assumptions about cricket intellectual property are risky. Obtain the applicable agreement and current permissions rather than treating historical guidance as clearance. Where rights are important to the business case, unresolved ownership questions should be escalated before signature.
Review delivery and financial exposure
Check payment timing, tax treatment, production responsibilities, insurance and supplier dependencies. Ask how postponement, cancellation or unavailable assets are handled. Any replacement benefit should be defined through an agreed process rather than assumed to be commercially equivalent merely because it has the same stated price.
An illustrative procurement worksheet can assign an owner to each risk: finance for payment exposure, marketing for activation capacity, legal for contractual interpretation and the delivery team for operational feasibility. This division supports review but does not replace qualified advice on the agreement or applicable law.
Specify evidence and approval gates
Agree how delivery will be evidenced and who approves public claims. ASA guidance distinguishes the sponsorship arrangement itself from advertising that refers to it, so procurement should not assume all related communications escape advertising rules. Build time for creative review into the timetable rather than treating approval as an administrative afterthought.
Before commitment, confirm internal ownership, activation budget and reporting expectations. After signature, retain the agreed inventory and change log as the working reference. Muntery Strategic’s planning lens is to help the buyer purchase a deliverable partnership, not simply a persuasive presentation with obligations left for another team to discover.
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