Dreamcast and Arsenal - The Greatest Football Sponsor in The Game
Sponsorships in football, or ‘Soccer’ as some people refer to it, are vast and varied across the world.
The highly commercialized sport has seen global giants sponsoring some of the most influential sporting teams, such as the 70 million euro deal with Emirates and Real Madrid, to the more strange ones such as Manchester City and Tinder. Although, there is one sponsorship from a retro gaming console which is above all when it comes to the beautiful game of football. We’re talking about when the SEGA Dreamcast sponsored the London-based team, Arsenal.
In this sponsorship, dating from 1999-2002, not only did the home kit feature the Dreamcast logo emblazoned on the front, but also features the SEGA logo on the away kit. The dual branding is still something we rarely see today, and we can’t help but love when we see videos of football legends such as Thierry Henry scoring an onslaught of bangers donning the 1998 retro console’s logo.
You would think that with this marketing stunt the Dreamcast would host some heavy-hitting football games for these football fans to splash out on. Instead, there is just a handful of football games you could enjoy that all received less than amazing reviews.
Some include Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000, UEFA Dream Soccer, 90 Minutes, Let's Make AJ-League Soccer Club, and Virtua Striker 2, which in fact was the highest-grossing arcade game in 1999 but had questionable reviews from critics when it hit the Dreamcast. All games listed are infamously bad, although nostalgic all the same.
SEGA would sponsor 4 football teams in total: Sampdoria [Italy], St Etienne [France] and Deportivo de la Coruña [Spain], and the biggest being Arsenal [England], but the real showstopper here is Arsenal. There’s just something about seeing David Seaman in a Dreamcast Jersey that puts a smile on our face.
