PHAR’s Insight team has been appointed to undertake an assessment of the sponsorship opportunity at the new surfing lagoon planned for TraffordCity, Manchester. Plans for the new £60m scheme were revealed in December, involving a central surfing lagoon powered by Wavegarden, the world leader in man-made, wave-generating technologies. The first inland surfing facility in the North West, early plans also feature a pump track and fitness zone, a halfpipe/boarding area and exercise areas including bouldering and balancing zones. Due to open to the public in 2023, the project – to be known as Modern Surf Manchester – is estimated to create around 100 equivalent jobs and will seek to capitalise on surfing’s growing worldwide popularity and recognition as a new Olympic Sport for the Tokyo Games.Billy McKinney, Managing Director at the project’s developer McKinney Group said: “On the back of becoming an Olympic sport, surfing is growing in popularity and our plans will deliver perfect and consistent waves to TraffordCity and build on the region’s excellent and world leading sporting assets. We have recognised that this has the potential to be an attractive sponsorship opportunity for a wide range of brands and PHAR’s expertise in this area is highly important to us as we develop our plans, ensuring our financial projections and also project design considerations are informed by firm evidence and intelligent marketplace insights.”Alastair Macdonald, PHAR Managing Director, added: “This is an extremely exciting development – both as a world-class leisure facility for people of all ages and also as an opportunity for a wide range of brands to benefit from association from one of the UK’s fastest-growing, most exciting sports. We are delighted to be working with McKinney Group on developing the sponsorship opportunity, not only identifying what the scale of the opportunity may be, but analysing how this potential can best be achieved.”
