ADVERTISING REACHES A NEW LOW (LITERALLY)
While not quite reaching the ridiculous saturation levels of advertising of sports like Formula One, it's fair to say that football gets ever more commercial with each new season. It's not just the big boys like Manchester United and Chelsea who are willing to sell their souls for a quick buck either, as Stoke City have now come up with a revolutionary and quite bizarre new way of selling advertising space - blades of grass on their pitch.
However, this announcement does seem to be a bit more like an advertisement for Sky Sports and their Sky+ HD high-definition coverage of matches, rather than a serious attempt by the Potters to get firms to sign up to advertise on a blade of grass. Apparently, last season, Sky Sports HD broadcast over 300 hours' worth of football in high definition. With crisp, clear pictures and vivid colour, every single aspect of the ground can be scrutinised by viewers at home - this even includes the 50 million blades of grass under players' feet.
So Sky+ HD is working with Stoke to brand individual blades of grass on their pitch with sponsors' logos, so the high definition cameras can pick up the intricate detail, providing local advertisers with an innovative way of promoting their brand to viewers at home. Well, the viewers who are bored enough to want to use their hi-def coverage to zoom in on a blade of grass and look at an advert, anyway.
Andy Billingham, Stoke City's Head of Sales explained: "We were intrigued when Sky approached us with this unique idea. Now we're in the Premier League we're looking for ways to maximise our advertising and sponsorship, but we never thought of selling space on individual blades of grass! We're already speaking with one sponsor to see if we can move this forward."
Sky's Christian Cull said: "We're always looking for new and creative ways to make the most of our cutting edge technology. From beads of sweat on players' faces to tears of sadness or joy on fans in the crowd, our Sky+ HD cameras pick up every last detail. So why not investigate an opportunity like this with the one thing that's shown the most - the turf!"
Indeed. However, we have to say that we have some reservations. For a start, which poor sap from the Stoke groundstaff will be given the task of glueing these miniscule little corporate logos onto individual blades of grass, and how much will the CSI equipment that they'll need to do it cost? And who exactly would pay money to have their advert put on something that has footballers running all over it? Would they get a refund if the blade was broken during a match? How would they tell?
Yes, the season hasn't even started properly yet and we've already found the daftest story...