Footballs – in the shape of the carbon allotrope buckminsterfullerene – won Harry Kroto his Nobel Prize. And the chemical industry has a surprisingly strong link to football. A quick scan of the old East German league tables, resplendent with such names as FC Chemie Halle and BSG Chemie Zeitz, is enough to show the association goes back a very long way. Numerous teams owe their very existence, one way or another, to the chemical industry.

Shirt sponsorship has raised the visibility of industrial support for local teams, too,. AstraZeneca’s logo has adorned the chests of Macclesfield Town players, and Burmah Castrol those at Swindon. And DSM has been writ large on the shirts of Dutch team Fortuna Sittard.

Undoubtedly the best known – and most successful – club to come out of the chemical industry is Bayer Leverkusen. Harshly tagged ‘Neverkusen’ by critics after last year’s defeats in the Champions League and German Cup finals and second place finish in the Bundesliga, the success they have had in the past few years has been remarkable, and the German chemical giant has garnered a huge amount of brand recognition as a result.

Bayer 04 Leverkusen is a 100% subsidiary of Bayer AG, having been founded by employees back in 1904 with support from the company, which thought it a good way to help retain staff. Now far from just a chemical works team, Bayer 04 is one of the biggest clubs in Germany, having graced the Bundesliga for the past quarter of a century. It even supplied more players to this year’s World Cup in Korea/Japan than any other single club side, including four of the German squad and one Brazilian who contested the final.

The company’s commitment to the football club is evidenced by the fact that it employs a sports coordinator, Meinolf Sprink, who reports directly to the chief executive. ‘We hope that Bayer 04 will compete every year in either the Champions League or UEFA Cup, because we are using it as a marketing and image tool on a national, European and worldwide basis. The stadium, the Bayarena, has a capacity of 22,500, and over half of the 16,500 season ticket holders are Bayer employees. It always makes me smile when I hear the fans shouting "Bayer, Bayer, Bayer" in support of the team. We are very proud of our soccer club, and on the day after games, you can sense that practically the entire Bayer staff are discussing how the team has performed.’

The company regularly carries out recognition polls and it is clear that the public connects the name Bayer with chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and football. Sprink is particularly amused by the situation in South America. ‘Because Bayer the company is so well known in Brazil, for example, when Bayern Munich are playing, a lot of Brazilians believe the team is actually called Bayer Munich! Munich is very successful – so why can’t they manage to spell their name correctly? But our brand name is so well known in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, they somehow link things to each other that don’t really belong together.’

Until 1995, there were actually two professional teams in Germany with the Bayer name. As Sprink explains, concentrating on just one was a strategic decision to avoid brand confusion. ‘We focussed on Bayer Leverkusen, by building the Bayarena and investing in players, and disconnected Bayer 05 Uerdingen, who now play in the Regionalliga Nord [two steps below the Bundesliga] as KFC Uerdingen 05. It was painful for our plant in Uerdingen, but we were, and still are, convinced that this was the right move in terms of marketing and branding.’

Last year’s run to the Champions League final proved particularly profitable on the marketing front. ‘If we have a regular season participating in the Champions League, you can put a price of around €100m on what it would have cost on television and print ads to get that kind of exposure,’ Sprink claims. ‘But last year, we had an incredible season, with games against Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United and the final against Real Madrid. And that sort of exposure would have cost us twice as much.’ This is far in excess of the amount which Bayer actually spends on the football team. ‘Our sponsoring contribution is around €50m, and we spend a further €5m on the infrastructure at the Bayarena, such as heating, water, maintenance and small capital expenditure,’ Sprink says. So as a marketing tool, the sums prove that owning a football team has been a big success for Bayer.

A world away from the heady heights of the Champions League is the League of Wales. There has been a trend over recent years for LOW teams to have their actual names sponsored, ranging from the inspired Inter Cable Tel Cardiff to the surreal Total Network Solutions (TNS to its friends). And then there’s Flexsys Cefn Druids.

Cefn Druids was formed in 1992 by the merger of two clubs based in villages not far from Wrexham, Druids United and Cefn Mawr. Flexsys is the largest local employer, with a plant in Ruabon, birthplace of Welsh national manager Mark Hughes. The company signed a five year sponsorship deal with the club back in 1998, when it paid for the installation of floodlights which brought the ground up to the standards required to join the League of Wales. So, on winning the Cymru Alliance League in 1999, they were able to take their place in the top flight of Welsh football, complete with the Flexsys name. And the former plant manager at Flexsys, Malcolm Pritchard, is now the club’s chairman.

‘We stumped up the money for the floodlights and other ground upgrades,’ explains the current plant manager Russell Owens. ‘We also agreed to give them further support on an annual basis, for things like kit and transport. We got involved primarily because they are a local team, based around half a mile from our plant at Ruabon, and they were involved extensively with the youth in the area.’

Currently, the players are extensively branded with the Flexsys name, with the company’s logo emblazoned on their shirts, tracksuits, warm-up tops and even kit bags. However, following an extensive downsizing at the Ruabon works, Flexsys is not renewing the sponsorship deal. ‘It’s not really appropriate to be sponsoring them to that level any more,’ explains Owens. ‘So we’ve told the club that if they want to market their name and sell it to someone else, then we’ll happily allow them to take Flexsys off it.’

Flexsys got involved with the club purely to support the local community, where it has been the largest employer for many years, so profile raising was not the aim. Though it does mean that the Flexsys name gets aired on Sky Sports every Saturday – and searching the internet for Flexsys throws up links to the football results alongside the rubber chemicals.

Premiership club Middlesbrough owes its continued existence in no small part to ICI. Back in 1986, Boro were languishing in the nether reaches of the old Third Division, and suffering from severe financial difficulties. The club had gone into liquidation in the July, weighed down by massive debts. A consortium of ICI and two of the region’s other big employers, Scottish & Newcastle and Bulkhaul, plus local businessman Henry Moskowitz, was set up to rescue the team. ICI put £200,000 into the club, and bought more shares five years later. The company also became one of the club’s guarantors to the Football League, having to pay over £1m towards settling outstanding debts. The company retained a 25% share of the club until early 2000, when it sold its shares to the current chairman Steve Gibson’s company, Gibson O’Neill, owners of Bulkhaul.

‘ICI was, along with British Steel, one of the major employers on Teesside,’ explains the John Edgar from ICI’s press office. ‘At its peak, it employed 30,000 people there, and had around 16,000 at the time Boro was struggling financially. ICI got involved largely as a service to the local community, to prevent the club going under. The intention was always to be involved for a while, let the club get back on its feet again, and then withdraw its investment. And this is what we did.’

As Terry Waldron, a Boro fan who is PR manager at ETOL, formerly ICI’s energy and services business on Teesside, explains, ‘Almost since ICI stepped in, the club has gone from strength to strength. They were promoted in successive seasons, and a lot more has changed in the intervening time, not least the building of a new stadium, the Riverside.’ ICI has changed, too, with its move towards specialties being accompanied by the sale of its bulk chemicals operations on Teesside, meaning it is no longer one of the region’s big employers.

‘There was no criticism of ICI for selling its stake, and it was generally acknowledged, not least by Steve Gibson, that the company had played an important role in the formation of the new football club, rescuing it from extinction,’ Waldron says. ‘We gained a lot of kudos from being able to say that we’d played a part as a company in rescuing the club.’