La Liga's sponsorship flight

La Liga's upper-middle-class sides look set to play this season without sponsorship on their shirts: if there are no last-minute offers, players at Atlético, Sevilla, Valencia and Villarreal will take to the field with blank shirt-fronts, as in days gone by. The previous sponsors have fled and new offers received do not meet the minimum financial demands necessary to adorn something as emblematic as these historic garments.

The so-called big two, Real Madrid and Barcelona, have retained their benefactors; the Qatar Foundation in the case of the latter, and the betting company Bwin in the former. Real's agreement is worth around 20-million-euro a season. When incoming Barcelona president Sandro Rosell discovered a 150-million-euro hole in its books, the Qatar Foundation obligingly stepped in with a 30-million-euro-per-annum, five-year offer.

The umpteenth whiplash of the economic crisis has seen offers from potential sponsors inside Spain to top-ten clubs fall considerably short of making any deal worthwhile, and the main foreign markets - Russia, China and the UAE - prefer to do their business in leagues with more international projection; the UK's Premier League, principally. For the middling clubs in La Liga, this could represent a loss of between 4 million and 9 million euros.

"These figures are no longer realistic," says María Vanacloig, Valencia's marketing chief. "There needs to be an adjustment but only to a certain point. We cannot drop our prices too much so we decided to go without a sponsor." Valencia had been sponsored by Unibet, a Swedish gaming company. It also had its fingers burned by a phantom company, Valencia Experience, which still owes the club 6 million euros for sporting its name.

Sevilla is another team that has been abandoned by its sponsor: 12 bet. The club's marketing chief, Manuel Vizcaíno, says new Spanish gaming laws have resulted in many more restrictions. "There are few offers," he adds, "because there is little knowledge that soccer represents the best return on a euro in the market."

Villarreal had in recent years been sponsored by Castellón airport, which belongs to the regional government, earning the club around 4 million euros a season. The Yellow Submarine is now in talks with a Spanish insurance company and hopes, if it reaches the Champions League group stage, to seal a deal worth a similar amount.

Atlético has lost, for now, the largest amount after its six-year association with Kia, the South Korean company, which paid 9 million euros a season to be splashed across the red-and-white shirt. Atlético has thus far failed to find a similar benefactor.

A club of more modest pretensions, off the field at least, Athletic Bilbao has renewed its agreement with Petronor, an oil company based in Bizkaia, worth an annual 2.1-million-euro with variables. Petronor is presided over by Josu Jon Imaz, a former leader of the Basque Nationalist Party.

Institutional assistance also sustains other clubs in La Liga, such as Real Sociedad, which receives 1.2 million euros a season to advertise the provincial government of Gipuzcoa.

Swimming in a sea of cash, Málaga has rescinded its contract with William Hill, a British betting company based in Gibraltar, in favor of wearing the name of Unesco on its shirts next season. "We have dispensed with the 1 million euro [sponsorship] with William Hill and opted for a contribution toward Unesco, similar to the agreement Barcelona has with Unicef," says José Carlos Pérez, a member of the two-man advisory panel to Málaga club owner Sheikh Abdullah Al-Thani.