January is typically the time to look forward, to forecast and predict what will happen in the coming year. To understand the state of the UK sponsorship industry, however, it’s more worthwhile to look at what happened in the months leading up to Christmas. Rewind to the week after Black Friday in December and big sponsorship news landed from the brewers of the black stuff. Guinness secured an early Christmas bargain when it announced it had agreed to sponsor the Six Nations Championship for six seasons from 2019. Headlines centred around the cut-price nature of the deal, although it is reported that the figure will rise to around £12m per season in 2024. The fact that this deal is way short of the reported £100m that the committee expected to generate prompted suggestions that the market is soft in general. So, as we enter a year of potentially huge political and economic turmoil, were the challenges faced by the Six Nations a symptom of a wider malaise in the sector? In short, the answer is no and you don’t have to look very far for significant deals that provide evidence that the UK sponsorship industry continues to thrive and offer…