Yorkshire and Leeds Rhinos open bidding for sponsorship of Headingley

The club are working with neighbours Leeds Rugby to secure a deal that could be worth at least £1m a year.

However, the aspiration is not being helped by uncertainty surrounding the £38m combined cricket/rugby ground redevelopment.

Yorkshire are urgently trying to bridge a £4m funding gap for a new main stand, essential to retaining international cricket in Leeds.

The club will lose England games unless a solution is found, with Headingley more attractive to potential sponsors if top-level cricket is guaranteed.

“Sponsorship of the stadium is an area that we’re putting a lot of energy into,” said Yorkshire chairman Steve Denison.

“It would make a real difference.

“It’s a key priority.

“We are trying our very best, working with the Rhinos and outside advisers, to find a suitable sponsor.”

Denison believes that a naming rights contract could be worth seven figures per annum, split between Yorkshire and Leeds Rugby.

Lancashire’s 10-year naming rights deal with Emirates is believed to be worth close to £10m, while Surrey reportedly gained £3.5m for a five-year arrangement with Kia.

“We and the Rhinos have a belief that the stadium as a whole should be worth £1m a year, something of that order,” said Denison.

“That would effectively be £500,000 to each side each year, but there would be a negotiation around that.”

Leeds Rugby chief executive Gary Hetherington is similarly optimistic. “£1m a year would be a conservative estimate, almost a starting point,” he said.

“You look at some of the major sports brands’ naming rights deals, and they’re into mega-millions; I think that Tottenham Hotspur, for example, are looking at something like £20m a year for a minimum of 20 years.

“The point is that we believe that Headingley has a lot to offer – it’s a northern powerhouse with wonderful history and heritage.

“We’ve got a terrific working relationship with Yorkshire cricket, and we recognise that, collectively, we can generate much value.”

For all Headingley’s uniqueness, Hetherington is aware that the stadium development is essential to its long-term future.

“We’ve not gone to market yet (on a naming rights sponsor) because what we need, first of all, is the announcement that the new development is going ahead and then we can immediately press the button and go to market and say that these are the opportunities that exist,” he said. “At present, we can only say that these are the opportunities that may exist, and we need to have that certainty going forward.”

Hetherington continued: “All we’ve done so far is speak to agencies who would be very keen to have the ability to go to market on our behalf.

“We want to go to market collectively on the basis that Headingley is a unique stadium with three sports and leverage some real value and some blue-chip partners who want to come in and be part of the future.

“Also, the other key partner in all of this is Leeds Beckett University.

“There’s not many sports bodies that have also got a key partner in the local university, so we think that, in terms of our appeal to companies who are looking at investing in the north, Headingley is a centre of sport with a great deal to offer.”

Notwithstanding the ground redevelopment, Denison believes that it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract naming rights sponsors in sport.

“Our commercial team have been putting a lot of work into this and we’ve been seeking outside help because there are organisations who specialise in finding sponsors for stadia, the most recent one being the Olympic Stadium of West Ham, who themselves struggled for quite some time to find a sponsor for that stadium,” he said.

“I also think that one of the factors around here is the contrast between the large businesses which reside in Yorkshire and the nature of their businesses, because to sponsor stadia you really need to be a consumer-facing brand, and while we’ve got some of those in Yorkshire, we haven’t got very many, and the ones that are here are not very keen on sports sponsorship.

“If you contrast that with Manchester, for instance, they’ve got a fabulous airport and they’ve got some big airlines who are trying to drive their businesses, so actually getting Emirates on board as a sponsor I suspect was a bit like shelling peas.

“But it is becoming harder, even in football, and I think it’s because the sponsors are doing more with their money and having to spread it more widely.”