The strange case of shirt sponsorships in La Liga, where many of the clubs in Spain are playing without one, has gotten just a tad stranger. A few outlets in Spain are reporting, El Mundo is one of them, but it all seems to have originated with journalist Alejandro Bascoy at Vavel.com, that a mysterious company called The Doyen Group has become one of the primary sponsors for not one, but three Spanish sides.

At first it was strictly an announcement via the Sporting de Gijón website that the club had come into an agreement with said company, and the shirts were unveiled at EL Molinon before their match against FC Barcelona with their rather simplistic logo attached to the back of the shirt below the numbers. The club were vague as to the association, what the terms of the deal were, even being dodgy with any contact information with publicity directors at The Doyen Group. It was an interesting but fruitless task to find information about the company, an interesting side-note I believe, until this week their logo appeared on an Atlético Madrid away kit against Granada. On the Atléti website could be found this statement: ¨Atletico Madrid has signed a sponsorship agreement with Doyen Group. The new co-sponsor is an international investment group looking to invest in the Spanish market, and which aligns itself with interests in leisure, entertainment, natural resources and large hotel chains, amongst others.¨ They´ve even popped up on Getafe´s kit on the backside of the shorts. It´s a real mystery.

If you investigate the company itself you find fewer answers and more questions actually. There is a Doyen Group Lmtd., a holding company based out of London near Camden, that dedicated itself to pharmaceutical development, but they have since been dissolved. The website doyengroup.com is the only obvious registered website but it´s just a parked domain with little behind it other than the fact that it is owned by DomainsbyProxy.com which in itself is a company owned by GoDaddy.com CEO Bob Parson which dedicates itself to being a proxy owner for individuals who are concerned with privacy matters and interested in keeping their private information beyond public scrutiny. Thedoyengroup.com is also registered through DomainsbyProxy, but it´s not just a parked website. There is some content there but it´s basically an executive headhunting firm. Doyen Medipharm Ltd is also based out of London, Cambridge actually, and they are also pharmaceutical related making plastics that served in the transport of medical supplies. More mysteries.

What then are people saying about the deals. Ángel Torres, the President of Getafe says that they´ve come to invest in young talent, ¨for us they´ve asked for asked for Abdel Barrada and two or three more canteranos, but for the moment, our commitment to them is limited to a sponsorship of 100,000 euros.¨ There is a slight whiff of Super-Agent Jorge Mendes in this, José Mourinho´s representative, as he is involved with some of the players that have ties to this operation: Rubén Pérez of Getafe and Alberto Pereira of Atlético Madrid, but it isn´t very up-front. What they want apparently is to invest whole or part ownership of young talent. It´s a formula that is ¨legal in Portugal, Spain and Turkey¨, which is obviously in the Jorge Mendes axis, and one that Torres acknowledges is the coming phase in Spain if the crisis continues even if he is reticent at the moment in selling percentages of his young prospects. They also represent players in Brasil and Argentina and are working with Deportivo La Coruña in the second division with a similar deal in place.

It seems like an obvious, above board operation, for cash-strapped teams in La Liga but I can´t help but feel troubled by the associations and the lack of transparency. It shouldn´t be this difficult in finding the faces of investors for clubs in Spain. I didn´t think I was covering Italian football for SerieAWeekly.