Summer pre-season trips are underway, the transfer market is in full swing and Wayne Rooney is back once again on the cover of a FIFA game. Yes, it's time for another season of European football.

Aside from the obvious connection between the sport and the video games based on it, football and gaming have another strange association: a long history of companies like Nintendo and Sega appearing as shirt sponsors for some of the biggest clubs in the world.

Not that this is necessarily a good thing: there's a reason most football teams are sponsored by insurance companies and Chinese casinos, and that's because it's a terribly unfashionable thing to do. Sponsors pay tens, and sometimes hundreds of millions for the "privelege" of being worn across the chest of some of the world's most overpaid athletes, with a net gain that the optimistic would call "slight" while the realistic would call "non-existent".

In this gallery are some of the more prominent examples, from the stylish to the sad, successful to the not-so-successful.