Why is chess failing to attract big name sponsors?

Question

Despite all the efforts that chess professionals put to the game the majority of them cannot make a living out of chess. Only 4 or 5 super grandmasters across the world have been able to make a few million dollars from chess. This is mainly because there are no good brands/sponsors associating themselves with chess. At one point, one former president of FIDE had to sponsor world championships from his own "pocket".

Over the years chess has been associated with big industries in business, technology, health, research, etc but it has not been able to attract major sponsors or partners to competitive chess. For example one would have expected a big spin-off from Google's AlphaZero and partnership with FIDE but nothing big has come out so far. Hence the following question;

Why is chess failing to attract major sponsors like other sporting codes?

Answer 1

It's frankly quite boring to watch chess, unless you understand what is going on - it's not like football, basketball or hockey, where there is dynamic, action, fast-paced play - for us, chess players, it might appear that chess is dynamic and fast-paced, but this is not so for the common viewer.

Let's be honest, would you really want to watch a chess game lasting three hours on your TV, waiting for the next move which the player takes 30 minutes to think through and calculate? Specifically for this reason you will never see chess featured on TV, and since it is not featured on TV, it does not get the luxurious contracts that other sports do.

Answer 2

Sponsorship is more like an investment. For example in video game competitions, companies like 'Sony' and 'Redbull' may invest money, of course, in the hopes that their audience will be more likely to purchase 'Sony' or 'Redbull' products since the players are using them. In your example, I don't see what AlphaZero has to gain from casual enthusiasts by sponsoring chess tournaments. Is the AI program something consumers can purchase? There's little gain there. And the other big reason as the other poster put it is that chess just isn't much fun to watch so the audience willing to sit through chess matches is very small, which ties in the first point about little gain from sponsorship.

Answer 3

Biggest reason? Indecisive games. Hard to make money for sponsors when 60%+ of the time there’s no winner. In a sporting event, no one likes ties.

Possible avenues are faster time controls, where at least spectators don’t waste half a day watching no one win.

Back in the 19th century Steinitz had match rules that required players to reset the pieces and play again if a draw happened. Maybe create something similar today. Continuous games until one is decisive, perhaps with declining time limits.

I know, draws are a part of chess. But spectators don’t care what’s a part of chess. For the most part, they don’t even care about quality of play. They want to celebrate a winner.

Maybe turn to a tennis model, with 3-5 sets of rapid games, each set won by the first player to win x number of games.

Chess, as we play it today, is not a sponsor’s game. The only game with as many indecisive games as chess is poker, and it kind of controls for that by having a table full of players, so if 3-4 have nothing, the hand is still competitive, so eventually someone wins.

Answer 4

Despite all the efforts that chess professionals put to the game the majority of them cannot make a living out of chess. Only 4 or 5 super grandmasters across the world have been able to make a few million dollars from chess. This is mainly because there are no good brands/sponsors associating themselves with chess.

How many javelin, discus, or hammer throwers have made millions of dollars from athletics? There's a tonne of sponsorship that goes into athletics, and the best athletes get massive worldwide television coverage at least every four years (with the Olympics), but I suspect that only a handful of sprinters end up as millionaires.

How about tennis? A few people at the top earn tens of millions from prize money and individual sponsorship deals, but the world number 50 barely makes a living.

The sports where a thousand competitors rake in the money are few and far between, and they're team sports where the leagues can provoke bidding wars between TV networks and then distribute the lucrative results among the teams.

Answer 5

Simply put, the primary purpose of sponsorship of competitions (or events in general) is advertising. The amount of money an organization would be willing to spend to sponsor an event is directly tied to the audience of that event and the likelihood of increased sales to that audience resulting from the advertisement.

Sports like American football, baseball, soccer, ice hockey, basketball, etc. draw large audiences (often many millions) to which sponsors can advertise their brand and products. Chess games, on the other hand, tend to draw quite small audiences. If chess can find some way to make the games interesting enough that millions of people will watch them on a regular basis, then they, too, will be able to attract large sponsorship contracts.

Of course, the same logic generally applies to all forms of advertising, not just event sponsorship. Advertisement during TV shows, on radio stations, in newspapers, in magazines, on billboards, on signs, on web banner ads, etc. is all based to trying to expose your brand/product to the the largest number of likely potential buyers for the lowest price per conversion. A small audience to an advertisement means few potential conversions and, therefore, little willingness to invest in that advertisement.

Answer 6

It's a fair question. I think that most of the companies who would have the cash to be anchor sponsor to, say, an international tournament would need to benefit by this association. This benefit is not going to be financial - it's going to be reputational, like big accounting or law firms sponsoring piano competitions. In the context of events likely to benefit a company's reputation there are many choices. And the more popular, more pleasurable or more socially beneficial events are likely to win out over chess in the company boardroom debate on where to spend the 'sentiment money'.

If you were looking for a sponsor for a chess tournament you'd probably have to find some organization priding itself on its ingenuity - or at least trying to get a name for ingenuity. It's no secret that governments in USSR, China, USA, UK, France and so on have actively promoted chess playing to cultivate strategic thinking among young people so recruits to its national defense establishments have some advance training. In the modern world maybe some of the major IT corporations might see a reputational benefit in this. But sadly those IT companies with a very real connection to chess, e.g. AI or critical software design, are usually rather small and simply not flush enough to blow millions on a single no-gain event. What's more, if an AI company grew to be a major, it would be faced with the same commercial imperatives as Coca-Cola: so its no-gain largesse would have to be spread around rather than concentrated on a single small sector.

But chess tournaments of course are not just held in superpower countries. They are often also held in countries where chess is a popular pastime among the ordinary populace, e.g. Argentina, Serbia, Holland, Poland, etc. These countries have numerous chess cafés and interesting local diversions for visitors and media people. Moreover whenever a tournament takes place it gives stimulus to patronage of these cafés by locals as well as visitors. All this makes the expense of hosting big chess tournaments a viable commercial proposition for the local economy. I think that the latter model of sponsorship is the better way forward for national chess federations: try and get small commitments from a large range of organizations - public and private - and try to exploit the tourism angle.

Answer 7

The professional chess is doing pretty well when compared to the past but nowhere close to what it could under different circumstances.

There are all reasons to have chess at the highest or just grandmaster level sponsored generously. There are the computer industry and the wealthy people who would sponsor chess just to feel good. Also, chess players know that the frequent occurrence of draws is not any serious problem -- chess fans are different from soccer fans. Also, chess games are excited to watch on TV or on the Internet, from classical time all the way down to bullets.

However, the last two former FIDE presidents were criminalists. FIDE was corrupt and unethical... such things are repulsive to sponsors.

If chess were totally decentralized, if there were no more FIDE, etc. (here I could provide simple general meta-principles of organizing professional chess life -- the amateur life is doing better it seems), then professional chess would bloom the big way.

Answer 8

Corporate chess sponsorship has increased in the recent years, and in 2019 Fide claimed that 15% of its revenues coming from sponsors.

The biggest partners for Fide are Coca-Cola and Rosatom.

Answer 9

Apart from the lack of action, it is also because chess is no longer a celebration of human excellence and triumph over computers as much as before. This was the time before Deep Blue when humans still had a chance, and computer manufacturers could use chess to promote their products. When people look at two humans playing, they know very well that they are not looking at strongest game possible, or some kind of latest advancement. So what else is there to be celebrated or sponsored? In fact, humans have stagnated at chess as a sporting endeavor for a long time, although they have learned how to train computers to do certain activities (including playing chess) more effectively.

Apart from machine learning applications, AlphaZero had the most impact on Go as humans could still hold their own before its arrival, while chess has lost this battle long ago along with checkers. This question implies that many chess enthusiasts are still oblivious to the outside world and do not have a firm grasp of the reality that surrounds chess.