While it might not have the strength of association with the Liverpool brand that Carlsberg and Candy did, Standard Chartered have been the longest serving shirt partners in Reds history.
Having first shook hands on a deal in 2009, prior to Fenway Sports Group 's takeover of the club from Tom Hicks and George Gillett in 2010, the global banking giant has been a mainstay throughout the past decade and into the 2020s, penning a four-year extension to the deal back in 2018 to take the partnership up to the end of the 2022/23 season.
When the deal was first struck it was on a par with the world record £80m that Manchester United were pulling in from their multi-year deal with Aon. It was a deal that then Liverpool managing director Christian Purslow described as "a hugely important day in the history of Liverpool Football Club."
Purslow commented at the time: "This is the largest commercial agreement we have ever entered into. To have attracted a partner of the calibre of Standard Chartered Bank says everything about where we are trying to take this football club."
The partnership has grown in value for both Liverpool and Standard Chartered, the former bringing in £40m per year - £160m over the life of the deal. For the latter it has allowed for their brand to be associated with a period of global growth for Liverpool and also be associated with success on it, particularly the 2019 Champions League success and the Premier League triumph of 2020.
It has had commercial and community benefit, supporting the United Nations' Global Goals programme and engaging in some of the work that the club does in both the local community and further afield.
But as Liverpool seek to build up their revenue streams once again after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, commercial deals and their strength will come back into focus.
The value of the Reds' major sponsorships with Nike, Standard Chartered, AXA and Expedia are worth around £436m throughout the life of the deals, and having been able to achieve uplifts in value with the Expedia sleeve sponsorship deal which saw the travel firm replace Western Union, and the potential the Nike deal has to far outstrip what was achieved with New Balance, Liverpool will be looking for their front of shirt sponsorship to deliver another uplift.
Liverpool's 2020 financial accounts, which took in only the first three months of the pandemic, showed the club made a loss of £46m before tax, swinging from the pre-tax £43m profit they made in 2019. When the financials for the year ending May 2021 are released and the full impact of no fans in the stadium and broadcast rebates are felt, the losses are expected to be even greater.
But the commercial activity in 2020, despite the challenges, rose from £188m to £217m as the club were able to continue leveraging their success on the pitch into more commercial revenues. Champions League football and having that global visibility on the biggest stage has become increasingly important to partners.
The past few months has also provided some insight into what Liverpool might be looking for when they are looking towards a new front of shirt deal from the 2023/24 season onwards. It could well be that they retain status quo and seek the kind of boost that that are seeking through Standard Chartered, or it could be that other players who previously weren't at the table when it came to sponsorship could come to the fore.
Manchester United said goodbye to Chevrolet earlier this year and signed a multi-year partnership with tech firm TeamViewer, a business that had seen major growth during the pandemic as businesses looked towards home working as a necessity, something that has remained in many places. It was the biggest shirt-only deal in Premier League history, worth £47m each year.
United claimed that they had even bigger offers than the total £235m TeamViewer were willing to pay, but it was the other benefits that the German-headquartered firm could bring to the table that prompted Old Trafford executives to strike a deal.
Tech firms that have seen a stock boom on the back of the pandemic and cryptocurrency firms that have flooded the marketplace are expected to be the ones taking the place of the betting firms that have been so prevalent in English football over the past decade, with a potential crackdown on gambling sponsorship on the horizon.
And it is these new players in the market that will likely drive up the value of deals, and Liverpool will be looking to make sure they keep pace with what the rest are doing.
Chelsea have a £40m per year, £200m deal in place with the mobile network Three, while Arsenal have something similar with Emirates, as do Manchester City. Tottenham Hotspur's sponsorship deal with life insurance firm AIA is another to be valued at around £40m, but with that deal running to 2027 it is worth a total of £320m to Spurs.
Liverpool may be re-entering the market at the right time as businesses recover from the impact of the pandemic, and the Reds will likely be seeking to try and at least get parity with Manchester United, if not better what they have managed to achieve through their TeamViewer deal.
With Liverpool's enormous global reach having only grown since the last time that the deal was renewed, the Reds have a strong hand with which to bargain with and some clues as to the strength of the market at present.
The £436m figure will likely be surpassed when the time comes to renegotiate just who will appear on the front of Liverpool shirts moving into the second half of the decade. Whether that improved commercial performance translates into more money being made available for strengthening the squad is another debate altogether.
