Pepsi, Budweiser and how Everton are using Hill Dickinson Stadium to build their brand
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Patrick Boyland
Everton's shiny new stadium is allowing them to leverage new commercial opportunities that previously wouldn't have been possible
For Everton and their chief partnerships officer Mark Rollings, it had all been building to this.
Leaving Goodison Park, the club’s home of 133 years, was an emotional wrench, but Rollings knew the move to the £800million ($1bn at current exchange rates) stadium on Liverpool’s waterfront offered the prospect of a “step change”.
“I joined eight years ago, and I remember it being in my interview that ‘you need to come on board and build out a partner programme because we’ve got this new stadium coming’,” Rollings tells The Athletic from Everton’s Liver Building headquarters, which offers views of Hill Dickinson Stadium to the north.
“That was the carrot that drew me in. We were heavily planning from four or five years out.”
Counting city rivals Liverpool and Wales Rugby among his former employers, Rollings’ role is two-fold. He works with Everton’s existing portfolio of partners and is also trying to expand it, while being part of the club’s executive leadership team.
The plan heading into the new stadium was simple but bold, with most commercial deals expiring over the summer in anticipation of the move.
“We had multi-year agreements with partners and pretty much staged it so that almost all of them, barring some of the biggest, were expiring (heading) into the new stadium,” Rollings says. “Which at one stage was terrifying because looking at the secured revenue column four years out, it’s zero. It’s a lot of work.
“I try never to see it as pressure. It had to be a step change. So we were telling long-term partners, ‘I know we’ve been together for a long time, but actually it now costs this’.
“It all went up for the new stadium and we didn’t really lose anyone.”
The scenes before Everton’s farewell to Goodison Park in May (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
Everton expanded existing deals with kit supplier Castore and watchmaker Christopher Ward, with the pair becoming founding partners of the new stadium — a new category that, among other things, grants the companies more visibility at the waterfront site on matchdays.
New headline sponsorships were also agreed with Pepsi and Budweiser. Pepsi has become Everton’s soft drink partner, and Budweiser is their beer partner, while also sponsoring the fan plaza housed in front of the East Stand. Both are founding partners.
“We were probably talking to Budweiser about 18 months before that deal happened, and not too dissimilar with Pepsi,” Rollings says.
“We’re the only deal that Budweiser and Pepsi have got in the Premier League. They (the deals) take a lot of time.
“People think it’s transactional. But you can’t sell like that these days. You have to sell a marketing solution. You sell stories.”
Everton plan to host concerts both on the 17,000-capacity fan plaza and inside the near-53,000-capacity stadium. Discussions with potential acts are already well underway. Hill Dickinson will host games at the 2028 European Championship, held in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and is one of the proposed venues for the .
“Music and the other events at the stadium were a huge thing for them (Budweiser),” Rollings notes.
“We produced sales materials that had no Everton on them. It was all music and other events, what the stadium was going to bring to the city, how it’s connected to the local communities, because that’s the sort of story they wanted to tell.
“What it says to the market is, ‘If the world’s biggest brewer is willing to invest heavily in this and believe in it, then you should’.
“It’s a real stamp of confidence. But ultimately we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the new stadium. That was the absolute critical piece of the whole jigsaw.”
Rollings says Everton “spoke to, or tried to speak to, in excess of 3,000 brands” during their search for a stadium naming rights partner, before eventually settling on global law firm Hill Dickinson.
He travelled around the globe seeking potential partners but ended up closing a deal in an office in Liverpool’s commercial district, with a group that started in the city.
He acknowledges the move “probably wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card”. Exact figures have not been disclosed, but, in a statement, the club described it as “one of the largest football stadium naming rights deals in Europe”.
“It shows you a couple of things,” Rollings says. “You never know who’s going to do it, so you need to try and talk to everybody and then really understand what it is that they have to take.
“It’s a great category, legal services. I could write on one piece of paper globally how many legal services brands have taken a step like that.
“That’s really important to us because we want to keep categories open for certain options later down the line. We’re going through a front-of-shirt process and we need to think about where that might be coming from. If you look at airlines, for example, that category is still free for us.
“So we haven’t really killed anything in terms of doing legal services. It’s a really good, clean brand. That’s why for us it was great.
“There’s obviously the local history and heritage story which I do think really matters when you talk about a building. They get it; they get the fan base, the history of the docks. So it’s different from a front-of-shirt asset. That is obviously anchored in visibility and this is anchored in placemaking. And I think therefore it’s a different sort of filter you put on it.
“For them, it’s a huge step, but it’s catapulting them to global notoriety. They’re able to build business networks now around that. They’ve got a good bank of tickets and premium spaces, and they’ve got a waiting list for them.
“You have people trying to bring people over from Hong Kong and Singapore and all these different places because they’ve got this amazing asset they can now use.”
Fans outside the stadium on matchday (Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
Everton are expected to announce record commercial revenues in 2026, surpassing the £64million they made in 2020, when Alisher Usmanov-linked USM Holdings paid £30m for the first refusal on stadium naming rights. Later sanctioned by the British government after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Usmanov was never in a position to take up the option.
In recent weeks, Everton have signed new partnerships with German brand Strauss, their new workwear partner, and BarberBoss, their first grooming tech partner.
Under new owners The Friedkin Group (TFG) and chief executive Angus Kinnear, the aim has been to leverage the opportunities brought about by the stadium move, driving revenues that should be invested back into the team.
“The stadium would be a leverage point for us to go and attract those brands, but they’re also paying proper money,” says Rollings. “So really decent year-on-year revenue growth, but it’s also the launch pad for what we want to do next.
“When I arrived we were selling Premier League visibility, which is obviously incredibly valuable and it will always drive a huge part of the value in everything we do. But now I think we are selling Everton as a marketing platform with a Premier League audience and access as part of the marketing bits.
“Often we go up against Formula One teams, rugby, all sorts. There’s also 19 other Premier League clubs all saying the same thing, so what are you saying that’s different?
“That mindset shift is the biggest difference, which probably translates to the Budweisers, the Pepsis. It’s going to be very difficult to ever achieve that kind of (commercial) revenue growth again given how things are structured with the new stadium.”
Further challenges are coming.
With Premier League clubs prohibited from having betting sponsors on the front of their shirts from next season and Everton currently partnered with the crypto site Stake, Rollings and his team are on the lookout for a replacement.
There will also be a focus on adding additional categories and breaking into new parts of the market.
Everton’s front-of-shirt sponsor Stake will have to change (James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
“You have to get your big stuff right,” Rollings says. “So we’ve got front of shirt and training kits, how we strategise around that. We’re deep in that at the moment and they’re the big revenue levers. Building that ‘we’re Everton’ narrative and commanding a premium is a really big focus for us.
“Then it’s broadening the new categories. We never had a soft drinks partner before Pepsi which is crazy but we didn’t have a vehicle like the new stadium to say, ‘That’s where you want your products’.
“We need to start thinking about how we get the airlines, the insurance, breaking into the big traditional categories. Of course we’re always trying to but they’re the really competitive ones. Now I think we have a really compelling story, a fighting chance of making an impact on those.”
There has been recent speculation in Italy that Roma, another team in TFG’s multi-club stable, are about to announce a new sleeve deal with Stake. Pursuit Sports, the company set up by TFG to manage its sports portfolio, is also likely to look at potential pooled sponsorship agreements involving Everton, Roma and French fourth-tier side AS Cannes, the other club owned by TFG.
“I think this is something that’s really important to this ownership group,” Rollings says. “I’m really connected to my respective colleague at Roma. We’re frequently talking about opportunities, sharing knowledge. It’s still early days, because it is still early days comparatively in how TFG knits all that together. But it’s definitely an objective of theirs.
“I’ve never seen it done really brilliantly, but I don’t think I’ve seen the level of commitment to it that TFG is showing. We’re excited about how we can collaborate, and I’d say Roma and Cannes are as well. When you’ve got Rome, Cannes and Liverpool together, you’ve got a really exciting mix of cities, culture, music, entertainment, Hollywood a bit as well. You can see that might be interesting (when) talking to an airline.
“I think there’s something there for sure, and we’re just scratching the surface really.”
