No company in the world is going to hand you over £50m+ sponsorship a year and then allow you to dictate design changes to their logo, its mental to think it would even be thought about by a potential sponsor
I see where you're coming from, and no offense intended here, but your black and white view of the matter is just wrong. I see it in real estate deals all the time - developments have design guidelines, and corporations (even big, multinational corporations) will come in and pay boat loads of rent dollars to occupy "prime real estate" (which, although our luster has faded a bit, the front of a Manchester United jersey still is). Sure, there's always a lot of back and forth where the corp. wants to keep its branding consistent across all storefronts, but usually it works out so that the developer/landlord mostly gets its way (like, say, using colored brick instead of hardy board to stay true to the design guidelines of utilizing earthy materials).
You're absolutely correct that Chevy wouldn't immediately acquiesce to our demands if we told them we wanted them to only use black/white lettering instead of the graphic, for example. But that's why every deal involves multiple rounds of negotiations. Look at other clubs and how they deal with their sponsors. The industry standard is, on the whole, that sponsors will slightly adapt their color scheme to fit on a kit better. Fly Emirates, for example, uses gold lettering on their jets, but white on Arsenal's kits. There are copious examples out there. My initial point was merely that we shouldn't just give away advertising space on our kits without imposing any restrictions on how the sponsor logo looks. We still have leverage, because companies still want to sponsor us. I have a feeling, and it's based on nothing except for the feeling that Woody and the Glazers don't really give two craps about our history, that they didn't even think to negotiate the design of the sponsor logo when they signed that deal. My point was: next time, we can and should do better.