The letters “AIG” are emblazoned on the shirts of Manchester United, one of English football’s most renowned teams. This sponsorship costs American International Group Inc. about $25 million a year in a four-year deal struck in 2006.
AIG is a foundering insurance giant, thanks to the credit-default swaps it sold to insure trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage- backed securities.
Lately, AIG has been rushing to the U.S. Federal Reserve for one multibillion-dollar bailout check after the another. But it has no immediate plans to reconsider its sponsorship of a British team playing a game few U.S. taxpayers over age 12 bother to appreciate.
“Our contract with Man U remains in effect,” AIG spokesman Nick Ashooh told me Monday.
There aren’t even plans to change the letters on the shirts to USA, despite the $123 billion U.S. taxpayers are investing in the rescue of AIG.
AIG has been excoriated for its post-bailout spending sprees, including the infamous $443,000 spa junket for independent insurance agents; an $86,000 partridge-hunting trip in England for top executives; and a lavish party that AIG’s aircraft-leasing division threw at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The festivities have gotten so out of hand that a congressional committee has demanded a list of all events AIG’s companies have hosted since Jan. 1 and a list of similar affairs planned for the next six months.
“The old ways of doing business at AIG must end now,” New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said after meeting with AIG’s new CEO, Edward Liddy, on Thursday.
AIG has since agreed to cut $8 million worth of junkets, including a $750,000 conference in Las Vegas. It has also canceled the $10 million golden parachute of fleeing CFO Steven Bensinger.
Nevertheless, AIG has committed to spending millions on a team that few American taxpayers will ever cheer. The year AIG announced the sponsorship, a telephone survey by the Pew Research Center revealed only 4 percent of U.S. adults rated soccer as their favorite sport to watch versus 34 percent for football.
This is what happens when you put a British guy in charge of an American company. Millions of dollars that could be going to the New York Jets or Denver Broncos instead go to people across the ocean who fail to understand that a football is not actually round.
The nearly $100 million deal was the richest sponsorship Man U ever landed. AIG became the third company to grace Man U’s shirts, behind Vodafone Group and Sharp electronics, advertising to captive audiences around the globe.
Imagine thousands of adrenaline-charged fans, some of them thinking, “I need a new cellphone,” or “I could sure use a flat-screen TV.”
OK, AIG is primarily a business-to-business brand. But surely in a crowd of thousands, there must be at least one drunk and belligerent soccer fan thinking, “Where the bloody hell can I buy some of those bloody credit-default swaps?”
In the U.S., AIG’s sports spending has been more modest, going for signage in venues including Madison Square Garden, Shea Stadium and Dodger Stadium. When AIG struck its Man U deal, some British commentators called it the largest global company most Brits had never heard of. “What does AIG stand for?” they wondered.
Maybe, America Is Gullible.
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
