Brooks Running has no business being on the front of a Premier League training shirt. And yet it makes complete sense.
The American running brand has announced a multi-year partnership with Crystal Palace, becoming the club’s Official Footwear Partner and front-of-training-wear partner across its men’s and women’s first teams. The Brooks logo will appear on Palace’s training, travel, walkout and warm-up apparel, as well as throughout Selhurst Park. It’s a substantial football partnership, not least from a brand that currently doesn’t make football kits or boots.
That, however, is precisely what makes this whole partnership so smart. Football sponsorship is usually overcrowded with the biggest sportswear brands wanting everything: the shirt, the boots, the training kit and, ideally, every visible surface in between.
But Palace’s existing technical partnership with Macron – who currently don’t operate in the world of performance footwear – leaves room for a dedicated brand to enter without creating the usual category clash. What Brooks gets is much of the visibility associated with being a club’s technical partner without having to become one. Its logo will sit prominently across apparel worn by Palace players throughout the working week, rather than only during matches when the club’s match kit takes centre stage.
Training-ground images, arrival photographs, warm-ups and behind-the-scenes content will all put Brooks in front of football fans. Then there are the shoes themselves. Footballers spend only a relatively small part of their lives wearing football boots. Away from the pitch, players are constantly travelling, training, recovering and moving between sessions.
That makes the humble running shoe an increasingly important part of the modern footballer’s uniform – particularly now that technical trainers have escaped the running world and become perfectly acceptable everyday footwear.
For Brooks, the appeal to enter football without pretending to be a football brand is hard to ignore. It's probably also worth adding them to the list of brands who could well become the next big challenger. Brooks is applying what it already does well – performance running footwear – to the considerable amount of running that surrounds the game. And, yes, there is quite a lot of it. The partnership also stretches beyond logos. Brooks will support Palace Run Club and sponsor Palace for Life’s Marathon March, the club charity’s annual 26.2-mile fundraising challenge across South London.
Running brands have spent recent years expanding beyond the sport itself. Their shoes have entered fashion, lifestyle and outdoor spaces, while run clubs have become solid social communities. Football, with its enormous cultural reach and increasingly style-conscious audience, is an obvious next destination.
Brooks has found a clever entrance. Rather than dress Crystal Palace for matchday, it can own everything around them instead. Brooks may not be Palace’s kit supplier, but by identifying the gap that its kit supplier leaves behind, it has landed one of the more unexpectedly logical football deals around.
