ITV seeks 5m sports sponsors

ITV is actively seeking broadcast sponsors for both the football World Cup and the England rugby union internationals.

Tim Brady, director of sponsorship for ITV sales house TSMS, which sells sponsorship for the network, says: “I will go into the market next month to look for sponsors for these packages.”

Brady will look for 4m for an overall broadcast sponsor for the World Cup, which will be staged in France next summer.

Some sports agents say the competition is close to becoming as popular as the Olympic Games, currently the world’s largest sporting event in terms of numbers of viewers and sponsors.

The World Cup is expected to generate $432m (261m) of sponsorship from its 11 main event sponsors alone. One of these sponsors is brewer Anheuser-Busch, owner of Budweiser, which under French law is banned from displaying perimeter advertising around the stadiums during the competition.

TSMS will look for 1m for sponsorship of England rugby union internationals taking place next year. The details of this package are still to be ironed out, but will include four games in the southern hemisphere, two internationals at

Twickenham, and another game in France against the French national team.

Brady expects to have struck both deals by early autumn.