M&C Saatchi is nothing if not resilient: it might be below siege from deputy chairman Vin Murria and her tech funding automobile, however it retains selecting up enterprise.

The company’s M&C Sports activities & Leisure has supplanted Iris on Barclays’ sports activities and leisure enterprise because the financial institution appears to have fun a 20-year reference to the UK’s Premier League. It’s also investing closely in ladies’s soccer.

CEO Jamie Wynne-Morgan says: “Barclays is without doubt one of the main champions of ladies’s soccer by file investments within the Ladies’s Tremendous League and because the first title sponsor of the FA Ladies’s Championship.

“This yr, the model will have fun 20 years of partnership with the Premier League, making it one of many longest-standing manufacturers in soccer sponsorship.

“It’s an extremely thrilling time to be uniting our shared experience and ambitions and we stay up for serving to each manufacturers construct on these game-changing partnerships.”

Advertising and marketing a financial institution have to be a humorous previous enterprise. Barclays has, little question, received loads of plaudits for supporting one thing as common as soccer. But a lot of the press they get is about unhealthy remedy of shoppers (in December 2020 Barclays was fined £26m for this), closing branches they might simply afford to maintain open and senior bankers’ eye-watering bonuses. Former boss Jes Staley stepped down over an affiliation in a earlier banking life with Jeffrey Epstein.

You could possibly, had been you so minded, see this as one other instance of “sports activities washing.”