Chris, I just read this again and need some clarification on what you mean, are you saying the sole reason for the pros coming under threat of a contracting sponsorship is solely because they are not professional and nothing to do with compromised industry sales?????
I think there are four things at work. I think none of them are contracting sales.
One, Pro team sponsorship, especially at the levels that Pro teams enjoyed for many years (playing the US and European circuits, etc) was *NEVER* a good business decision. But, because the guys who ran the paintball companies were the same guys who were playing on the teams, the fact that sponsoring Pro teams was a bad business was overlooked.
Two, paintball companies are getting bought out by people who do not play paintball, and look at paintball team sponsorship as a business decision, and quickly determined that sponsoring pro paintball teams at the level they had become accustomed to was a bad business decision. What does a sponsor get by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on a Pro team?
Now, I'll spend an extra paragraph here: It is possible that for companies like DYE and Smart Parts that *IF* their level of sponsorship is contracting it is because, due to lack of sales, they are forced to make some hard decisions and spending their profits on paintball teams was a decision that was easy to make, since cutting sponsorship of your Pro paintball teams isn't going to affect your sales (because, as we showed above, sponsoring the teams in the first place wasn't affecting your sales, and if you're going to cut spending, you sure as hell don't want to cut it where it's going to hurt your business!)
But, one and two are both symptoms of the same thing: Most pro teams are not worth the money - they don't increase sales enough to make up for the money spent on them; or at least, don't do it as well as spending that same money somewhere else.
Anyway, on to three: Pro paintball teams spend too much money on stuff they don't need to spend it on. There are teams out there that fly players to practice every weekend, or fly the whole team somewhere else to practice. One way to make it easier for your team to be sponsored and compete is to cut your expenses. Maybe a player who is local to you who isn't QUITE as talented as the guy you are flying in is a better business decision than spending an extra $5,000+ a year flying a guy around. Pro paintball teams need to learn to operate under more restricted budgets.
And four: Back when the teams WERE getting big sponsor dollars despite not being a good business decision, almost NONE of them did anything to CHANGE the fact that they were a bad business decision. I'll take Dynasty as an example to the contrary - they probably remain one of the few teams where spending a pile of money on them gets you a return. Even when they were struggling last year. Why? Because they developed beyond just being a team that shows up at events; they took the time, energy, and money they had and put it into developing a Dynasty brand. Did anybody else do this? Certainly not enough people. The Pro paintball teams utterly failed to brand themselves into something that COULD provide value to sponsors when they had the opportunity to do so.
Anyway, I reiterate that the reduced sponsorship for Pro teams has almost NOTHING to do with the reduced sales. Looking at it another way, what if instead of sales contracting, they had continued to grow a bit more, but everything else had stayed the same. What do you think would have happened then?
Exactly the same thing - the same people would have bought the businesses, and the same people would have looked at how much they were spending on Pro teams, and the same people would have said "This is a waste of money" and cut team sponsorship spending.
You see, whether or not you sponsor a Pro team isn't really based on how much money you're making over all. It's based on whether or not you think sponsoring that team is going to get you even MORE money. If you spend $500,000 on a Pro team and make $1,000,000 because of it, you WILL sponsor that team, whether your sales are 150% what they were last year, the same, or 50%.
So when people blame contracting sales, they have entirely missed the problem. The sales don't matter. If you were worth more than what it cost to sponsor you, you'd be sponsored.
