Nineteen hundred and two. That is the year Slazenger became the official supplier of balls to Wimbledon, and it has never stopped since: it is considered the longest-running sponsorship in the history of sport. Nobody in 1902 talked about a sports marketing strategy. Yet that choice already had everything: a clear objective, the right property, a product that works inside the event rather than next to it, and a time horizon no annual plan would ever have foreseen.

Many brands still think sports marketing is about visibility: buy a space, put a logo on it, count the TV exposures. It is not. It is about method. The difference is the same as renting a shop window for a season versus building a shop that customers keep coming back to. The first is paid for and forgotten. The second works for years.

What strategic sports marketing is

Strategic sports marketing is the set of choices through which a company decides why to enter sport, which sport and which property, which rights to buy, how to activate them and how to measure the return, starting from its own business objectives rather than a passion for a discipline. Tactics are the single event, the campaign, the post. Strategy is the thread that ties them together and allows you, at the end of the season, to say what worked and why.

Put in commercial terms: without a strategy you buy exposure. With a strategy you buy a result.

The five decisions that build a sports marketing strategy

1. The objective, before the sport

Awareness in a new market, B2B relationships, sales, reputation, internal motivation: these are different objectives and they call for different sponsorships. In my experience, the question “which sport do we like?” almost always comes too early. The right one is “what needs to change in our numbers three years from now?”

2. The right property, not the most famous

A sport, a championship, a team, an athlete or an event: each brings an audience, a geography and a price. Formula 1 speaks to a global audience and demands significant budgets; MotoGP has an audience more concentrated in Europe and South-East Asia and a more direct relationship with its riders. Neither is better in absolute terms. Each becomes better in relation to an objective.

3. The assets: what you are really buying

The logo on the livery is the visible part, not the only one. You buy image rights, hospitality, paddock access, content, category exclusivity, the right to use the team’s brand in your own campaigns. A well-run negotiation shifts the weight from the logo to the assets the objective actually needs.

4. Activation, where the game is played

A contract without sponsorship activation is an empty sticker on a bike, a car or a shirt. Activation is everything the brand does around the rights: client events, content, promotions, employee engagement. In my view it is also the line that budgets underestimate most often.

5. Measurement, decided before signing

Indicators, tools and thresholds are chosen before signing, not after. Brand exposure on TV and online, awareness studies, leads generated, sales, the value of hospitality: every objective has its own indicator. Whoever decides what to measure once the season is over always ends up measuring what went well.

Cases that have stood the test of time

But don’t take our word for it. Look at what some brands that have worked with sport for decades have done.

Shell and Ferrari have worked together since 1929. In Formula 1 the relationship has had three spells, from 1951 to 1964, from 1966 to 1973 and then uninterrupted since 1996, and a new multi-year agreement started on 1 January 2026 that also covers the Hypercar programme in the World Endurance Championship. SKF has supplied bearings to the Scuderia since 1947: according to both companies, it is the longest uninterrupted partnership in Formula 1 history. DHL has been Formula 1’s official logistics partner since 2004 and renewed the agreement in 2024, remaining the championship’s longest-serving global partner. In all three cases the product works inside the sport: fuels, components, logistics. That is why these relationships last.

Outside motorsport, in 2012 Procter & Gamble launched “Thank You, Mom” one hundred days before the London Olympics: the biggest campaign in the company’s 174-year history, built on its worldwide partnership with the International Olympic Committee and on a simple idea, telling the story of the athletes’ mothers instead of the athletes. Olympic rights, household products, a universal emotion. Strategy.

There is also a lesson worth as much as the others. Repsol was title sponsor of the factory Honda team in MotoGP from 1995 to 2024: thirty years, 183 wins and 15 riders’ titles across 500cc and MotoGP. At the end of 2024 the partnership closed, after difficult seasons for the team and Marc Márquez’s departure. Even the best strategies have an expiry date, and recognising it is part of the job.

What the United Kingdom teaches

Few countries have turned sporting tradition into commercial value the way the United Kingdom has. The first Grand Prix to count towards the Formula 1 world championship was held at Silverstone in May 1950. In 2026 the British Grand Prix drew 564,000 people to the circuit over four days: the best-attended weekend in Formula 1 history, beyond the 520,000 spectators at Adelaide in 1995.

The lesson for brands is that a sport’s heritage is an asset, not a memory. Wimbledon has built its value without chasing every available sponsor; Silverstone has turned a historic circuit into a four-day event. Whoever enters these properties does not just buy an audience: they buy continuity. It is no coincidence that Formula 1 is living its most popular season ever, as we explain in our piece on why Formula 1 is so popular.

The mistakes I see most often

The first is choosing the sport out of passion. It happens more often than you would think that the decision stems from the chief executive’s favourite championship. That is no sin if it matches the objective; it is when it replaces it.

The second is buying too short a horizon. In Formula 1, according to our September 2026 survey, a presence with meaningful rights starts at about $2 million a year, almost every team asks for at least two seasons and single-race deals are rare and limited to small branding spaces. The market itself is saying that one season is not enough to build anything.

The third is measuring visibility alone. TV exposures are easy to count, and for that reason they become the only number in the report, even when the objective was something else. The fourth, and the most expensive, is not budgeting for activation: in my experience, whoever does that has bought half a sponsorship and paid the full price.

Measuring the return, even when it seems impossible

The return on a sponsorship can be measured, provided you decide beforehand what to measure. An example from our archive: at the 2000 World Ducati Week a regional investment of 294.2 million lire generated an economic impact of 13.8 billion lire, a ratio of 1 to 46.9, as we tell in the World Ducati Week case study. It is the return of a territory, not of a sponsor brand, and it dates back twenty-six years: it shows that return can be measured when you choose what to measure, not that it is guaranteed.

For a brand the indicators change with the objective: commercial leads generated through hospitality, growth in awareness in the calendar’s markets, sales linked to promotions, the value of the content produced. Numbers do not lie, as long as you have decided beforehand which ones to look at.

The method, in short

Objective, property, assets, activation, measurement. In that order, never the other way round. It is the method we have worked with for more than thirty years at RTR Sports Marketing, from choosing the championship to the negotiation and the end-of-season report, and not because it is elegant: because it is the only one that, when the contract ends, lets you answer the question that matters, namely whether to sign again.

You rent a shop window for a season. You build a shop to stay. That is all strategic sports marketing is.