SPONSORS
Hull City
Flamingo Land
2015 — 2016
Flamingo Land was not a typical football shirt sponsor. In 2015/16, the Yorkshire theme park appeared on Hull City’s shirts as the club fought its way back to the Premier League. By the end of the season, promotion had turned one of football’s most unusual sponsorships into a lucky story worth remembering.
THE STORY
Flamingo Land, a major theme park and holiday resort in Yorkshire, was Hull City’s main shirt sponsor for the 2015/16 season. That alone made for an unusual visual combination: the name of a theme park across the chest of a traditional English football club. Even more interestingly, the partnership was officially announced as a one-year deal.
Visually, it worked surprisingly well, too. Flamingo Land used a clean, text-based wordmark rather than an overcrowded corporate logo, giving it a look that felt quite different from the more typical betting, banking or technology sponsors seen on football shirts.
Interestingly, Flamingo Land did not sponsor Hull City alone. During the same 2015/16 season, the brand was also associated with Middlesbrough, and, remarkably, both clubs secured promotion to the Premier League by the end of the campaign. Flamingo Land CEO Gordon Gibb later joked that they could be called “the luckiest sponsors in football history,” while the company also recorded an increase in ticket sales during that period.
