Sponsorship has become a crucial revenue generator for sports organisations but navigating this landscape and securing the right deals for the right reasons can often be easier said than done.
Many sports rights holders are facing a complex financial challenge, this being that broadcasters are often not willing to pay as much for media rights as previously. Some leagues are exempt from this, of course, like the high-value Premier League, but many others are now seeing an onus shift towards sponsorship as a cash driver.
FIFA, to name one prominent example, now sees sponsorship account for one-third of its overarching revenue each year, the governing body’s Director of Marketing, Brand and Business Intelligence, Marco Nazzari, shared at the SPORTEL Monaco sports business conference this week.
Nazzari noted that sponsorship has added value to marketing and branding, creating new ways for leagues, teams and tournaments to engage with audiences via partners’ campaigns.
“It gives us the possibility of bringing our competition to life,” Nazzari said. “Our partners are the ones who help us communicate the tournament, activate the tournament, and build stories around the tournament.
When it comes to both broadcasting and sponsorship, however, organisations like FIFA have it relatively easy in comparison to others.
This is not to belittle the challenges these massive organisations face, but it is hard to deny that tournaments like the World Cup are in big demand from both prospective sponsors and media partners.
“We have to find unique ways to market properties to sponsors.”
Lowell Conn, President of Protocol Sports Marketing, a Canadian rights distributor and sports marketing agency, joined FIFA’s Nazzari on a panel at SPORTEL. In many cases, he stated, sports rights ‘are nice to have not need to have’.
As a result, many sports stakeholders need to take very different approaches to sponsorship and media rights. In the case of sponsorship, tailoring deals to meet the right audiences is essential. Stakeholders need to find ‘niche ways to generate sponsorship activities’.
“I’ll give you an example,” he told the audience at SPORTEL. “With the Olympics and FIFA, largely their sponsorship efforts are focused on a cross section of consumers across the world.
“We have to find unique ways to market properties to sponsors, and somewhere we’ve had a lot of success right now is reaching out to sponsors who target ethnicities, expat communities, niche audiences within our markets, which is a really effective approach.”
The significance of knowing your audience when crafting a sponsoring strategy is key. Football in particular is no stranger to controversial sponsorship deals, some of which earn the ire of fans.
A proliferation of betting partnerships in English football has resulted in fan backlash, for example, particularly a number of deals signed with little known Asian companies. In Germany, meanwhile, a deal between Borussia Dortmund and a major arms manufacturer saw fans protest during the Champions League final.
As women’s sport continues to grow, factoring in the needs of the female sporting audience has become increasingly important for stakeholders to consider.
Speaking from his experience of his native Canada, Conn noted that hockey does not have a solely male audience and “brands are sponsoring hockey with specific messages, products and services for women”.
Looking beyond Canada’s borders, however, women’s football and women’s basketball are the clear growth leaders when it comes to women’s sports, split between Europe and the USA, respectively.
The growth enjoyed by women’s football can be seen in England alone. The Women’s Super League’s (WSL) attendance figures have risen considerably year-over-year, it has secured coverage via deals with BBC Sport and Sky Sports, and has a valuable sponsor in Barclays Bank.
“We need to start telling women’s football in a different way.”
It is logical then to see what FIFA’s representative thinks about the women’s sports sponsorship potential and value. Referencing last year’s Women’s World Cup in Australia, Nazzari remarked that the tournament’s success ‘was massive’.
“We have never experienced something like that, especially around stadium attendance,” he said. “Media rights are growing, but the amount of people attending the match was massive.
“Now we are going to Brazil, taking women’s football to a continent where we can develop it a lot, especially a Brazil where football is a religion.
“We need to start telling women’s football in a different way. It’s a different story that we need to tell, and that is something that is taking a lot of energy from the association.”
With the dynamics of global sports constantly shifting, the panel expects sponsorship dynamics to shift in a number of different ways also. Nevio Devide, Chief Revenue Officer at the Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026, which is handling commercial matters for the 2016 Italy Winter Olympics and Paralympics, expected physical marketing to make a return, for example.
Meanwhile, all three panellists agreed that esports will see growing sponsorship value, with the sport continuing to capture the interest of stakeholders active in the more traditional sports spaces.
Though there are countless varying factors to consider when crafting an approach to sponsorship, longevity is perhaps the most important. To build that connection with an audience and ensure steady revenue, the longer-term the partnership, the better.
As FIFA’s Nazzari emphasised: “When you stay with a company for many years you build up a narrative around the partnership, and the benefits pay back.”
