Football sponsorship operates on an assumption so embedded in the industry that it is rarely questioned: meaningful partnerships require significant money, which means they are available only to large brands. Club Deportivo Municipal, a historic Peruvian club competing in Liga 3 after consecutive financial-pressure-driven relegations, and McCann Lima challenged that assumption with a pixelated grid and a starting price of 100 Peruvian soles.
The Context
Club Deportivo Municipal is one of Peru’s oldest football clubs, founded in 1935 and historically one of the country’s most decorated sides. By 2025, financial difficulties had pushed the club down to Liga 3, Peru’s third division, a position that made attracting the kind of corporate sponsor that typically anchors a club’s commercial operation structurally very difficult. McCann Lima’s CCO Charlie Tolmos described what the club’s leadership said when they approached the agency: they needed to find sponsorship, and they had no idea how.
The agency’s response began with a fan consultation. What they found was not simply emotional loyalty. A significant portion of the club’s supporter base were small business owners. Shopkeepers, tradespeople, service providers, local entrepreneurs who could not afford a traditional sponsorship package at any conventional price point, but who had both the means and the desire to contribute something. That observation changed the entire structure of what the campaign became.
The Jersey
McCann Lima redesigned Deportivo Municipal’s kit around a pixelated grid of hundreds of small black-and-white squares, creating up to 1,000 individual sponsorship spots across the shirt. The club’s iconic red sash, its most recognisable visual element, was layered across the grid as an anchor for the design’s identity. Each square on the grid represented a purchasable advertising space.
Sponsorship slots were priced starting at 100 soles, Peru’s currency equivalent to roughly $27, making official jersey partnership access available to a local business that could not spend thousands. Businesses, supporters, and small enterprises could buy a square, see their name or logo printed on the official match kit, and receive the partnership benefits and visibility of a formal sponsorship at a fraction of the conventional cost.
Tolmos described what the design communicates: “Instead of one big sponsor, they were thousands of small sponsors who together could match the money a big sponsor would have put in. That’s why we like this idea, because it’s real love for the shirt.”
The jersey as an object became a document of the club’s community. Every square filled was a business that had chosen to be associated with Municipal’s return. The shirt became something closer to a neighbourhood directory than a commercial garment.
The Cannes Recognition
From 660 entries in the Entertainment Lions for Sport at Cannes Lions 2026, the Grand Prix was awarded to The Thousand Sponsors of Muni. Jury President Shannon Washington, CCO and Managing Partner at 11 Ounces, delivered the citation in terms that went beyond the execution itself: “What got me about ‘The Thousand Sponsors of Muni’ is the sheer, simple ingenuity of it. Taking a club in crisis and turning that crisis into a thousand acts of belonging. The craft is exceptional, down to the math behind the pricing and the grid on the jersey itself. But what makes this Grand Prix-worthy is what it says about sport: this is fandom doing the work that money used to do, and community deciding what the future of a club looks like. It is a reminder that the real power of sport does not live in a sponsorship deal. It lives in the people who refuse to let the thing they love disappear.”
Washington also noted something the jury specifically discussed: the campaign highlighted one of the least-acknowledged realities in professional sport, the concentration of commercial value at the top of the pyramid and the structural exclusion of everyone below it.
The work won the Entertainment Lions for Sport Grand Prix alongside a Bronze in both PR and Design, with McCann Lima also taking home Peru’s second Grand Prix of the festival week for its separate BCP campaign “SOS POS” in Creative Data. Peru, with 11 Lions in total, was one of the most recognised nations at Cannes Lions 2026.
The Broader Argument
The Thousand Sponsors of Muni belongs to a specific and growing category of work that rewrites the rules of a commercial category rather than simply producing a campaign within it. Sports sponsorship has operated on a tiered exclusivity model for decades. Big brands buy visibility. Smaller brands buy adjacency. Fans buy tickets. The jersey grid inverts that architecture entirely, treating fandom as a direct commercial asset and creating a financial instrument from community loyalty that had previously had no mechanism to express itself in the club’s balance sheet.
The campaign also coincides with the club’s 90th anniversary, a milestone that the initiative frames as a community act rather than a brand celebration. A historic club that has been loved for nine decades finding a way to turn that love into structural financial support is a different kind of anniversary activation than a commemorative kit release.
Campaign Name: The Thousand Sponsors of Muni (Los Mil Sponsors del Muni)
Agency Name: McCann Lima / Production: Fertil Lima / Post-production: Agosto Music Lima, Nativo Post Lima
Brand Name: Club Deportivo Municipal
Location: Lima, Peru
