Three-times relegated team wins a big prize, but not on the football pitch

The Historic Club Deportivo Municipal From Peru saw their chances of survival diminished with the fear of relegation and big bills to pay.

The club has a rich history, played on the highest level for a long time, was founded in 1935 and has four Peruvian national titles. The club has been struggling since their relegation from the top level. In 2023 they relegated from Liga 1 to Liga 2, and subsequently relegated again the year after (2024) to Liga 3. If that was not all of the misery, in March this year (2026) they disqualified from Liga 3, through disciplinary action, as the club could not pay for the debts to the players' union and the Federation. The club landed in the Copa Peru, which is more a regional amateur competition, which could be their route back to pro football but it's not a straight promotion.

With the debt to pay and not a lot of attention at their level, they opted for not getting one new shirt sponsor, no they got a thousand new shirt sponsors all paying roughly sixty bucks ($60 or 200 soles). The thousand spots on the jersey were sold to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and groups of supporters or individual fans. Not a single big brand was signed up as a sponsor.

And guess what? The thousand spots sold out in three months.

Now here's a new challenge. How do you fit a thousand sponsors on one shirt? That's where the design comes in. An ad agency in Lima put their head together and came up with the design that gave every sponsor a spot on the jersey, thanks to a redesigned pixelated black and white checkerboard on the jersey. It even could give homage to the original club design where the diagonal red stripe and club crest were still legible over the shirt.

Eventually the team did win a prize. They didn’t win a prize as they expected on the soccer field. They won the Grand Prix in Entertainment Lions for sports at Cannes Lions for the "The Thousand Sponsors of Muni" campaign.