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Cisse Refusal To Wear Shirt Does Wonga Massive Favour

11 years ago
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A story doing the rounds today is that Papiss Cisse has allegedly said told the club that he doesn’t want to wear the new shirts that will feature Wonga.

If you remember this story was done to death when the deal was first talked about, with talk of Newcastle’s Muslim players as a group possible all refusing to play in the shirts on religious grounds. The core discussion point being that Sharia law prohibits the fixed or floating payment, or acceptance of, specific interest or fees for loans of money.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if a player believed the above should be strictly observed in terms of not promoting it, then the same would have applied to Virgin Money and Northern Rock.

Call me Mr (or Mrs) Sceptical but this ‘story’ could have come from Wonga’s very own PR department.

Every mention of Wonga, whether in a positive or negative light, is good news for the payday lenders. When people are in a position where they have to use a payday lender, the companies are all as bad as each other and the interest rates barely differ between them, the big problem being that the UK government (unlike others such as Germany who don’t allow such high levels of interest) allow these interest levels to be charged. Put it this way, how many more of us are aware of Wonga now, compared to before their tie up with Newcastle United? I bet their brand awareness has gone up tenfold since the Newcastle deal and the supposedly ‘negative’ publicity!

So this latest Cisse story means they (Wonga/Wronga) can’t lose, the extra publicity this weekend (including this article!) just enhances their brand.

If Cisse did end up being the only player in the Premier League not to have the sponsor’s logo on the shirt…what a story that would be! (There are precedents including Freddie Kanoute  wearing a shirt without a logo when playing for Sevilla and their sponsorship deal with an online gambling company)

Methinks Newcastle United have massively undersold themselves with this sponsorship deal.

 

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