Fifa signs Chinese sponsor

China’s Hisense Group has signed with FIFA to become a World Cup sponsor, a major win for an organisation dogged by a corruption scandal and struggling to enlist corporate partners for the world’s most popular sporting contest.

Hisense, a maker of consumer electronics largely unheard-of outside its home country, joins McDonald’s and Budweiser in the soccer body’s second highest of three sponsorship tiers.

As part of the agreement, its logo will flash up on LED boards both on the field and on scorecards during TV broadcasts of the upcoming tournament in Russia. Before Hisense, FIFA had secured just one new top-tier level partner — China’s Dalian Wanda Group — since the last tournament in Brazil. FIFA had just nine companies on its roster for the tournament, excluding Hisense. That compared with 20 by the time the Brazil World Cup kicked off.

“Sponsoring the World Cup is a good way for Hisense to quickly build brand awareness internationally,” Liu Hongxin, Hisense’s president, told reporters yesterday in Beijing.

But Chinese companies from Wanda to Huawei Technologies have grown increasingly aggressive in sponsoring major sporting contests in recent years as they seek to grow their businesses abroad.

Wanda, run by billionaire Wang Jianlin, has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to FIFA. The deal marks a much-needed win for FIFA, which is dealing with the fallout from 2015’s corruption scandal that threatened the sporting group’s existence and forced out long-term president Sepp Blatter.

US authorities in May 2015 charged several senior soccer officials with ties to the organisation on corruption charges.

Bloomberg