On 17 October 2025, during the United States Grand Prix weekend, Apple announced that it had bought the US television rights to Formula 1 for five years, starting in 2026. According to CNBC it pays around 140 million dollars a year, against the 90 million ESPN was paying. A few months earlier, in June, F1, Apple’s film with Brad Pitt, had come out in cinemas.

A company that sells phones and computers paying that kind of money to show cars going round in circles: put like that, it sounds like an extravagance. It isn’t. It is the clearest, and most expensive, answer to the question this article carries in its title: do sports marketing and sponsorship still matter? They do, and for a reason that was not so obvious a few years ago.

Two jobs with the same name

When people say “sports marketing” they often mean, without realising it, two different things. The first is the marketing of sport: a league, a team or a championship selling itself, its tickets, its TV rights, its shirts. The second is marketing through sport: a company that has nothing to do with football or engines using sport to reach an audience it would otherwise struggle to reach.

Sponsorship is where the two meet. It is the right, bought by a brand, to associate its name with a team, an athlete or an event, and to use that association in its own communication. Sport gets paid, and the brand steps into a story the audience is already following of its own accord.

Why it matters more today than yesterday

For years we were told that traditional television was finished, that everyone would watch what they wanted when they wanted, and that advertising would have to find another line of work. Some of that has happened: in the United States, in May 2025, streaming overtook broadcast and cable television combined for the first time, according to Nielsen. Series get watched whenever there is time, and the audience has scattered across a thousand screens.

With one exception, which in the meantime has become the rule. Live sport is still watched live, all together, at the same moment. According to Nielsen data, in 2025, 96 of the 100 most-watched TV programmes in the United States were sporting events. It is no surprise, then, that even the platforms built to let us watch things whenever we like have started buying sports rights, and one of the reasons is precisely the live broadcast, which brings the whole audience in at the same moment. Netflix has carried WWE Raw since January 2025 and in 2026 it broadcast the opening game of the baseball season; Apple has held the US rights to Formula 1 since 2026.

For a brand this changes quite a lot. The ad between halves can be ignored, by changing channel or looking at your phone. The name on the shirt, on the car or on the pitchside board, on the other hand, is inside the thing the audience is watching, and it cannot be skipped like an ad.

What has not changed

It would be a mistake, though, to think that being there is enough. A logo, on its own, is still just a logo: it can be seen, but it says nothing about the brand, it does not bring a customer into the grandstand, it does not become content. The sponsorships that work are the ones where the company uses what it has bought: it hosts its own customers, tells stories with the athletes, builds experiences for the fans, measures what happens. We have written about it when discussing experiential sports marketing and how to build a sports marketing strategy that works.

Nor has it changed that sponsorship costs money, and that its value rests on real numbers. Anyone who wants to know how big the market is today will find up-to-date figures in our article on the power of sports sponsorship.

Where companies most often stumble

Two beliefs, opposite to each other, come up often when we talk about this with companies.

The first: “with digital, sponsorship has become pointless, you should only invest online”. The digital platforms are doing the opposite: they are buying sports rights, partly because sport is one of the few kinds of content still watched live.

The second: “just buy the visibility, the rest will follow”. It won’t. Visibility is the part you can see, but the value is built by what the brand does with the sponsorship, before and after the race.

How we approach it at RTR

RTR Sports has worked in sports sponsorship since 1995, mainly in motorsport. We start from the company’s objective, the audience it wants to reach and the markets where it sells, and only then do we choose the sport, the team and the way to use them. If you want to understand what a sponsorship agency can do for you, this is the right place to start.

The question in the title, in the end, was answered by a company in Cupertino. With a cheque, before it even knew how much it would get back.