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To: Blackburn Rovers Football Club
Ethical Sponsorship in Football
Dear Blackburn Rovers Football Club,
We are requesting that you reconsider your sponsorship with Zebra Claims Ltd. and future sponsorship deals with similar organisations.
We are uncomfortable with the football club being associated with an organisation charging significant fees for work where charities will assist people for free and may cause people hardship.
We request that the club terminate the contract or undertake to only make sponsorship agreements with organisations outside controversial industries.
We hope that the football club can set an example to other clubs across the UK and the World by taking this action.
Why is this important?
Football is traditionally a working class sport with a significant proportion of supporters being of a low income background. This is particularly the case where Blackburn Rovers FC are a relatively small club, where the majority of its fan base is in Blackburn itself. The town arguably has more social deprivation than many in the UK, and as such, the population is likely to be more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by fee charging claims management companies, debt advice companies etc.
Blackburn Rovers FC is the most important organisation to the town of Blackburn in the 21st century, and there is therefore a moral duty for it to reflect the needs of the community around it. The football club would gain significant respect if it were to display charities such as the Citizens Advice Bureau and Step Change or an ethical private company such as Payplan on its shirts.
This would be a statement that the club acknowledges the level of financial difficulty a large proportion of the town and its fan base faces. It would also encourage other football clubs to do the same where fans are feeling increasingly distanced from their football clubs with television deals coming into hundreds of millions of pounds and accusations of tax evasion now commonplace.
