This is the time of year for rich men bearing gifts in the east, even if the east in question was hardly the fenlands of England. Nevertheless, Cambridge, the National Division Two club, will go into the new year with ambition renewed after establishing an association with Alki David, the Greek billionaire.

From next month their playing field at Wests Renault Park on the Grantchester Road will bear the logo of filmon.com, the video-on-demand business, which is only one of David’s interests in the entertainment industry. It is not, when all is said and done, a sponsorship that will transform the club overnight but it has the potential for growth that has brought club and businessman together.

It is the first involvement in sport in Britain for David, 39, and it happened after he had looked into the possibility of buying into Coventry City, the Coca-Cola Championship club. His interest extended beyond ownership of the football side, since he also considered the use of the Ricoh Stadium as a venue for the filming and production of virtual sport.

The figures, though, did not add up. “It was a bit of a fiasco,” David admitted but it also brought him into contact with the Quite Great Publicity marketing company, based in Shelford near Cambridge, who had been invited by the city’s rugby club two months ago to enhance the profile of Cambridge and attract more sponsors.

“We were in the right place at the right time,” Rod Bishop, a former player who has been president of Cambridge for the past nine years, said, but the club’s own efforts at self-help have made them an attractive proposition. At the turn of the millennium they were struggling along in London’s second division and barely 70 people attended their matches; but they have been promoted three times in the past four years and are setting their sights on National League One, only one tier below the Guinness Premiership.

They stand eighth in National Division Two over Christmas, a record of seven wins and seven losses with a side the average age of which is about 23 and a healthy contact with Northampton, four of whose academy players have appeared regularly in Cambridge colours this season. About 700 people regularly watch their home games and they consistently provide lunch for 200 on matchday in facilities the equal of any other club in a league that includes such famous names as Blackheath and Waterloo.

“We have tapped into the Cambridge corporate market,” Bishop said. “The sponsorship money we get is split between improving our facilities and the playing side, so that both can keep moving forward together.” That the name of Cambridge is recognised worldwide has been no hindrance and helped to secure the agreement of a “substantial cash injection” over an initial period of two years. It is also helpful that David has a link to Cambridge through his late cousin, also called Alki, who attended the university.

Before becoming a successful businessman, David played rugby at Stowe as a hooker before, in his own words, “running away and becoming a fish farm labourer then a skiing instructor”. He returned to school in Switzerland before giving his commercial talents free rein but his main sporting interest is in freediving rather than mainstream sport. Even so, he believes an association with an English rugby club at Cambridge’s level could benefit rugby in Greece, a country which does not at present have an affiliation with the International Rugby Board, although it does play international games against opponents such as Austria.

“The field at Cambridge is a door,” David said. “I’m sponsoring something which could grow substantially in a quality sport which itself has more growing room. There are a lot foreign athletes involved in Greek rugby and it would be nice to help develop an all-Greek team which was capable of competing in a European championship.

“I feel Greeks could be extremely good at rugby because, inherently, they’re quite brutish but also quite crafty. It’s an open-ended agreement with Cambridge and we’ll see where it goes. Rugby has had a massive lift in profile over the last five years and there is still so much potential.”

There is, of course, a solid barrier just to the west of Cambridge formed by Bedford and, more substantially, Northampton and Leicester but the presence of rugby’s traditional super-powers did nothing to stop Worcester’s rise to elite status on the other side of the Midlands. Who would question Cambridge’s right to aspire to join them, if they can find a sponsor with deep pockets and the enthusiasm to create, as David put it, “the first rugby giant in East Anglia”?