Yesterday, Vauxhall said goodbye to the Scotland national football team, or soccer if you speak American. However, the British brand has announced it will be ending all of its sponsorships with the home nations after 2018.
Following the 2018 World Cup, Scotland, the football teams from England, Northern Ireland and Wales will need to seek out a new sponsor for the health of the game. However, Vauxhall did state it had agreed to explore other opportunities to continue its relationship with each football team.
Vauxhall became the official sponsor of each team in 2011 and renewed its contract in 2013. Neither the football clubs or Vauxhall have revealed how much the sponsorship is worth, but it was reportedly inked in a multi-million-pound deal.
The brand stated it will “concentrate its marketing resources on communicating the wealth of new, innovative and technologically advanced models that will be launched over the coming months and years.”
This all comes hot on the heels of Vauxhall’s sale to PSA Groupe by General Motors. However, ending the sponsorship was reportedly not due to Vauxhall’s new French owner.
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The new owner does not yet own Opel/Vauxhall
There have been mumbles about PSA killing Vauxhall and either quitting UK or replacing with Opel.
Automotive News muses that LHD isn’t worth the engineering costs, even though PSA already does this, and that Vauxhall should be sold to Tata.
I think The Griffin is safe, for now, but wish Barra hadn’t been so rash in seeking GM’s most okinteresting division.
We will watch PSA work wonders with Opel in India–a move GM should have tried given Chevrolet failure on the sub continent.
In kind, Vauxhall could do well in India, too. It would have done well in any former British colony.
PSA is interested in Opel, because Opel is strong in markets, where the PSA brands are rather struggling, namely Britain with Vauxhall and Germany with Opel. So why should they kill the cow which they purchased to milk it, grasing on the green pastures of England and Germany?
Think!
OTOH, automobile production on the island could be in jeopardy by Brexit — the Brexiters have no clue what they are doing, and their talk of a “British car industry” which they imagine as standing against a “European car industry” is pure fantasy. They don’t understand automobile production exists at all on the island thanks to Thatcher’s move to join the EU, and that this industry is an integral part of integrated production processes distributed over several countries or all of the European Union. Depending on what comes out of the separation negociations, the owners of the automobile factories in Britain might decide to reduce their activity there. Mind you, even Tata lets build a new factory for Jaguar-Landrover in Slovakia.
But who knows the future… it might well be that the separation talks get mired in an inability to separate the Europe wide integrated processes, and that the EU common market turns out to be as sticky as the Hotel California: “You can check out any time, but you can never leave.”
I bet that the two year deadline will get extended at least one time, maybe more, and maybe in permanently.
This is Brexit in play. Why would Europeans (in this case the French) want to pump their hard earned cash into the UK when the UK has given them the finger. Look for more of this fallout as Brexit fully plays out.
JLR Group have announced they are to start rebuilding new E types, I hope Vauxhall follows suit & builds a few classics & sold as new to enthusiasts. It’s a win win situation restore 50 to 100 of one particular model & sell as new to eager enthusiasts, then when their all sold repeat the process on another model. It wouldn’t harm sales of any other models in the range & enthusiasts get to buy a modern whatever it is sold alongside current range & included in those sales figures. Imagine we could have the Velox & Wyvern sold alongside Corsa & Astra 🙂